Announcing: Azure credits for open source projects

Open source software is an integral part of development at Microsoft, aligned with our goal to empower all developers to be successful building any application, using any language, on any platform. We are committed to building open, flexible technology and working with the open source community to grow together as an industry.

Today we’re excited to announce a program to give back to that community: Azure credits for open source projects.

This program grants Azure credits to open source projects for a year. Developers will be able to use these credits for testing, storage, or other development. Any project in any technology with an Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved license is eligible to apply.

We’ve already extended these grants to some projects in the open source ecosystem. Highlights include:

• FreeBSD: FreeBSD is a Unix operating system for servers, desktops, and embedded platforms. Azure credits have helped developers to work on custom kernels. They are now releasing more timely updates for security advisories for third-party software and spinning up larger VM classes for package building and smaller VM classes for testing, both of which are hugely helpful to their developers. The project is using its Azure credits to expand the project’s CI coverage prior to commit. FreeBSD does lots of resource–intensive testing. These credits provide the resources to do that testing, as well as providing a platform to try out different resource optimization strategies. 
• Alma Linux: An enterprise Linux distribution system that is using their credits to build an Alma Linux image.
• Haskell: Haskell is a purely functional programming language. Azure credits are helping their continuous integration system, releases, their GitLab instances, and other builds.
• Snakemate: The Snakemake workflow management system is a tool for creating reproducible and scalable data analyses. Workflows are described via a human-readable, Python-based language, and Snakemake enables these to be seamlessly scaled to server, cluster, grid, and cloud environments. Snakemate is using its Azure credits for developing the Azure plugins for Snakemake, as well as testing those integrations.
• Promitor: From the maintainer of the project, Tom Kerkhove: “If there is one thing I love to do, then it is building open-source products that close gaps in the Microsoft Azure offering, such as Promitor & Kubernetes Event Grid Bridge, and make them available for free so that everyone can benefit from them. However, this means I don’t have budget for spinning up Azure resources to integrate with, verify changes and build qualitative software. Thanks to Microsoft’s Azure sponsorship I can keep on doing what I love, without having to make my software a paid product so that the community can use it at their convenience.”

Learn more

We’re thankful to the whole open source community for fostering innovation and inclusion, and we hope this program contributes to the community even more.

You can learn more about the program and apply by visiting the Azure Credits website.

You can learn more about open source on Azure by visiting the open source on Azure overview.

Carol Smith

Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Open Source Programs Office

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