This is our first edition of the Open Source Weekly, a roundup of recent open source related community news, product announcements, popular docs, and demos from around Microsoft.
This will be far from an exhaustive list of everything open source going on around the company. After all, there are more than 16,000 people across Microsoft working on open source projects. Instead, we hope this is will be an informative recap of relevant open source highlights to keep you in-the-know.
Anything you’d like to see more or less of? Let us know in the comments.
According to one survey, only 11% of open source participants are women. Our good partner Red Hat is trying to raise that number and is recognizing women who are making a difference using open source with the 2018 Women in Open Source Award. Get your nomination in by October 30.
The next Azure OpenDev, our live technical series featuring open source community leaders, will be streaming live on October 25 at 9am (Pacific). The event will be hosted by Microsoft’s Ashley McNamara (ahem…would be a great nomination for the above-mentioned award…just saying) and will spotlight DevOps solutions. The event will include developers and advocates from great open source DevOps projects and companies like HashiCorp’s Nic Jackson, the Jenkins Project’s Tyler Croy, and community advocates from Chef, GitHub, and Elastic. Save the date.
If it’s not obvious from the picture, the team was pretty stoked to be at Node Interactive this year. In addition to quickly depleting their inventory of new Node.js Ninja Sloth T’s, they were there celebrating the new alliance with nearForm to support developers migrating Node.js apps to Azure, as well as the release of the Azure Application Insights SDK for Node.js 1.0.
Pui Chee “PC” Chan joins Scott Hanselman to discuss native support for Jenkins in Azure, including the plugins that make it easy for you to build your project using a container agent and then automate deployment from Jenkins to an Azure Container Service Kubernetes cluster.
For more, see: Announcing Deploy to Kubernetes (blog) and Jenkins.io links: Azure Container agent, Deploy to Kubernetes, and Deploy to Azure Container Service.
For more, check out the Azure blog announcing the preview of Java support for Azure Functions.
docs.microsoft.com is the home for Microsoft technical documentation, API reference, code examples, quickstarts, and tutorials for developers and IT professionals. Here a couple recent open source updates:
Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed NoSQL database service designed to enable you to elastically and independently scale throughput and storage across any number of geographical regions with a comprehensive SLA. You can develop document, key/value, or graph databases with Cosmos DB using a series of popular APIs and programming models. There is lots of new documentation on the docs site, including quickstarts, tutorials, samples, and 20 days of tips courtesy of Developer Advocate Simona Cotin.
We want developers around the globe to have the best ASP.NET Core documentation experience, so Microsoft added translations for German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese, as well as enabled bilingual view, so readers can see what the original sentence in English looks like when they hover over the translated sentence.
Helm is an open source packaging tool that .and manage the lifecycle of Kubernetes applications. Similar to Linux package managers such as Apt-get and Yum, Helm is used to manage Kubernetes charts, which are packages of preconfigured Kubernetes resources. This article shows you how to work with Helm on a Kubernetes cluster deployed in Azure Container Service.
Amazon Web Services and Microsoft announced a new deep learning library, called Gluon, that allows developers of all skill levels to prototype, build, train and deploy sophisticated machine learning models for the cloud, devices at the edge, and mobile apps. The Gluon interface currently works with Apache MXNet and will support Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) in an upcoming release. Check out the news here.
In addition to participating in JavaOne last week, there have been several updates to the Java offering on Azure. Microsoft recently announced support for securely deploying and redeploying Java apps on Kubernetes in Azure Container Service using Maven and Java support for Azure Functions, which is now in public preview. Check out the Azure Functions Java developer guide to learn more. Microsoft also released Azure Management Libraries for Java v1.3, which adds support for Availability Zones, Network Peering, Virtual Network Gateways, and Azure Container Instances. For more, check out the Java on Azure site.
Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL, built using the community editions of MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, offers built-in high availability, security, and scaling on the fly with minimal downtime. This week, the team announced that the public preview is expanding to Canada and Brazil data centers. Learn more about Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Database for MySQL, or create a new database with MySQL or PostgreSQL.
If you like these weekly updates, follow us @OpenAtMicrosoft to stay in touch daily.
In 2018 we (re)-open-sourced MS‑DOS 1.25 and 2.11, and more recently in 2024 we were able to make the source for MS‑DOS 4.0 available to the public as well. Today, on 86-DOS 1.00’s 45th anniversary, we’re continuing that tradition with the earliest DOS source code discovered to date.
How Microsoft uses AI agents and Drasi to keep open‑source documentation accurate and working.
Microsoft unveils the Agent Governance Toolkit to bring OS‑level security, trust, and compliance to autonomous AI agents.
At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam, we're making announcements that reflect the goal of bringing the operational maturity of Kubernetes to today's workloads and demands.
