Microsoft Just Made It Easier To Use AWS Cloud Services

The times, they are a-changin’! Amazon and Microsoft may be archrivals, but the software giant is very much at ease when it comes to collaborating with competitors these days.

For the greater good.

This time, the greater good is making it easier for programmers to use AWS, the rival cloud.

Up until now Microsoft programs have primarily advertised their ability to deploy applications on the Azure public cloud, but recently announced integrations with Amazon Web Services take things to a whole another level.

Developers can now connect Microsoft Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services applications with the AWS platform.

Including popular services like CloudFormation, CodeDeploy, Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda and S3.

Redmond put up a blog post detailing this recent rollout, and providing more information on the ways in which developers can take their code that they manager on Microsoft tools, and deploy it on the AWS cloud, hooking into these abovementioned Amazon Web Services offerings.

These new tools allow programmers to upload content to the widely used AWS S3 storage service, automate deployments with CodeDeploy, and run apps with the Lambda serverless computing service, all without leaving their Microsoft environment.

Microsoft has made things really simple here, and this latest development shows the intent the company has to build integrations with rivals, whenever and wherever possible.

Central to this cooperation is the Visual Studio ALM Rangers Group that is tasked to come up with out of band solutions for missing features or guidance.

It worked together with Amazon engineers to build these integrations.

According to figures provided by Synergy Research in July, Amazon leads the cloud infrastructure market, holding a 34% share. Microsoft, on the other hand, had 11% to its name. But the big takeaway here is that both cloud leaders are willing to work together to make development easier for everyone.

The times, they are a-changin’!