Today we are sharing exciting news about the expansion of the number of public clouds supported by OpenNebula to build hybrid cloud deployments. As a result of the collaboration between OpenNebula and Microsoft, a new set of plug-ins to support Microsoft Azure has been included in OpenNebula. This partnership has been announced today by Microsoft Open Technologies at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON).

“With this set of plug-ins, IT pros and system integrations can use OpenNebula’s rich set of infrastructure management tools to manage cloud deployments across Microsoft’s private, public and hosted cloud platforms.”

The Beta version of  OpenNebula 4.8 bringing the new drivers was released today and is available for testing. The integration has been carried out using the Microsoft Azure SDK for Ruby, which interacts with the Azure REST API, enabling a complete control of the lifecycle of Virtual Machines in a transparent way within an OpenNebula cloud. Thanks to these new plug-ins, private resources can be easily supplemented with resources from Azure to meet fluctuating demands.

So far the only public cloud officially supported by OpenNebula to build hybrid cloud deployments was Amazon AWS. Supporting multiple public cloud providers opens the possibility of defining pre-determined schedule or performance-based policies for the execution of applications in different clouds, that can be fine tuned to achieve an optimal placement in terms of performance and cost. This new support also enables the ability to meet services constraints regarding special functionality offered by a subset of the supported public cloud providers, like for instance high availability.

Need more information? You are welcome to use the OpenNebula community instruments to ask around (for instance, the users mailing list is a good place to pose your questions).

As always, we value your feedback and contributions to this new feature!