Microsoft has expanded Azure Arc‘s Linux and Kubernetes capabilities to allow Red Hat customers to manage OpenShift clusters and data services on Azure.

The announcement came during the virtual Red Hat Summit where the open source giant unveiled a raft of new features for OpenShift and Kubernetes to help organisations develop and manage virtual machines, containers and serverless workloads.

Microsoft’s announcements will enable Azure Arc customers to centrally manage, secure and control Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers and OpenShift clusters from Azure at scale. It will also allow customers to apply their own policies and manage compliance for servers and multiple clusters.

Applications built in GitHub repositories can also be automatically deployed via Azure Policy and Azure Arc to any linked OpenShift cluster with policies that can be used to keep them up to date.

Red Hat’s own announcements start with OpenShift virtualisation, which is available now as a technology preview within OpenShift.

This has been developed via the KubeVirt open source project and enables organisations to deploy and manage applications consisting of virtual machines alongside containers and serverless. This can be done all in one unified cloud-native platform, according to Red Hat.

This update comes with Red Hat OpenShift 4.4, the latest version of Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes platform. Based on Kubernetes 1.17, OpenShift 4.4 is intended to offer a developer’s view of platform metrics and monitoring for application workloads. This includes monitoring integration for Red Hat Operators and costs management for specific applications across a hybrid cloud environment.

The company has also addressed management challenges for running cloud-native applications across large-scale, production and distributed Kubernetes clusters with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes. This will also be available as a technology preview and will provide a single, simplified control point for the monitoring and deployment of OpenShift clusters at scale.

“While some vendors seek to protect legacy technology stacks by dragging Kubernetes and cloud-native functionality backwards to preserve proprietary virtualisation, Red Hat does the opposite,” the company said. “Bringing traditional application stacks forward into a layer of open innovation, enabling customers to truly transform at their speed, not at the whims of proprietary lock-in.”

The updates come just days after parent company IBM posted its first-quarter figures with revealed that Red Hat had seen 18% growth revenue in the first three months of 2020. As a key driver of IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy, Red Hat has helped IBM’s cloud revenues to consistently rise.