Going native with Azure

According to Microsoft themselves, about 1/3 of all Azure workloads are Linux - and it has been so for quite some time.  If you've been following us over the years, then you'll recognise that we've certainly been working to play in Microsoft ecosystems.  This is exemplified by our Mono/.Net products, our image support, and of course Chef/Orchestration.

In addition to all of this, we've been running workloads and experimenting with the Azure cloud platform for quite some time and are now officially shipping and supporting the Node/Azure SDK from Microsoft (check out our Terraform et al for our Golang Azure SDK).

RPM packaging NodeJS applications is rather challenging in that unlike other applications, Node-based ones ship with a plethora of small modules/libraries, rather than perhaps fewer more mature modules as in a Python or Ruby stack.  Our nodejs-azure-cli RPM actually deploys with 369 dependent RPM packages - quite a stack to maintain.  The reason that we actually bother to ship this is because we do want to reliably deploy slave nodes to manage Azure infrastructure. 

Look out for future announcements around Jenkins CI/CD workload and operations management utilising our native Azure CLI!