Recently my co-worker Mike Neil forwarded me this great article on IT Jungle regarding IBM and Microsoft working together to bring .NET to Red Hat Enterprise (RHEL) users running on IBM Power hardware.
This great find of an article points out a key step here in regard to PPC64LE (the Linux on Power Architecture) development. Fully supported RPM packages and container images for PPC64LE are something that Microsoft has not historically focused on. Most of the tooling that MS has worked with and provided to support PPC64LE has been done by specific people within Microsoft as ‘pet projects’. Unofficially MS has previously generally viewed this area of Linux support as an ‘edge case’ and not a serious market, and this is a good step towards showing that there is interest in this sector and can lead to more development for enabling native agents on Power hardware.
It’s important to note that this is currently a Red Hat Enterprise (RHEL) only solution – CentOs/CentOs Stream (Free versions of RHEL), as well as Ubuntu or other similar free Debian-based distros, are NOT included, so you must have the Red Hat Enterprise License, which is a non-trivial investment.
However, unlocking this architecture’s development for Modern MS tools for any Power Linux OS is progress. PPC64LE repositories have languished regarding enabling things like PowerShell or .Net or other modern MS Tools and will enable the current generation of developers to start leveraging their organization’s already established investments in Power architecture. Thus, it’s also a critical step towards alleviating the ever-increasing skills gap that is occurring in the IBM i / AIX / Linux on Power compute space by making these environments more accessible to modern tooling and approaches.
You can read the complete article posted on IT Jungle here.
Skytap team members that contributed to this blog:
Matthew Romero – Technical Product Marketing Manager at Skytap
Michael Neil – Vice President, Technical Field Operations at Skytap
