Microsoft acquired London-based jClarity in a move to bolster support of the Java programming language for workloads running in its Azure cloud platform. It's also the latest open source push for the cloud-computing giant.

The jClarity team has been a contributor to the AdoptOpenJDK project that helps users build binaries of OpenJDK for platforms like Linux and Windows. OpenJDK is a free and open source implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition programming language. JavaScript and Java held the top two positions in Redmonk’s recent ranking of top programming languages based on information from GitHub and Stack Openflow.

Microsoft has been a sponsor of the AdoptOpenJDK project for more than a year, and said it will continue to support development of the platform.

“At Microsoft, we strongly believe that we can do more for our customers by working alongside the Java community,” explained John Montgomery, corporate VP of program management for developer tools and services at Microsoft, in a blog post on the deal. “The jClarity team, with the backing of Microsoft, will continue to collaborate with the OpenJDK community and the Java ecosystem to foster the progress of the platform.”

Montgomery explained that Microsoft uses Java for its Azure HDInsight and the game Minecraft. He also noted that many of Microsoft’s Azure customers have brought their Java production workloads to the cloud platform. “With more than half of compute workloads running on Linux, Azure has become a great platform for open source and that certainly includes Java,” Montgomery added.

JClarity was started in 2012, and today counts five employees including its three initial co-founders. It competes against firms like Plumbr, New Relic, and AppDynamics. Martijn Verburg, who was one of those co-founders and served as CEO, noted in his blog post that he was taking on the role of principal engineering group manager for Java at Microsoft. Verburg added that the company would be working with its current customers regarding ongoing support.

The AdoptOpenJDK project is a free OpenJDK distribution that replaces Oracle’s JDK. Oracle has distanced itself from overseeing ongoing support of the Java programming language, including the OpenJDK open source implementation of the language. Red Hat is the current steward of OpenJDK, having taken on that role in April. Red Hat’s parent company IBM has also been a long-time sponsor of the AdoptOpenJDK project.

The project last month released its first quality assurance open tests that run against its AdoptOpenJDK release builds. The tests determine whether a binary meets specific quality standards for enterprise customers, including whether they are functionally correct, secure, performant, scalable, and durable.

For Microsoft, the deal also continues what has been a dramatic turn toward the open source community.

The company last month invested $1 billion in OpenAI, an artificial intelligence (AI) research startup co-founded by Elon Musk. The two companies are also developing a hardware and software platform on Microsoft Azure that will train and run advanced AI models. Additionally, under the multi-year partnership, the companies will jointly develop new Azure AI supercomputing technologies.

Microsoft earlier this year snapped up Citus Data, which specializes in big data and analytics. The two companies are working to delivery enterprise-ready features from Azure to the PostgreSQL open source management system and enable critical PostgreSQL workloads to run on Azure.

Of course, its biggest push into the space was the $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub last year. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at that time noted that: “We’ve always loved developers, and we love open source developers."

Microsoft had historically been averse to open source software platforms like Linux. Former CEO Steve Ballmer at one point called such platforms a “cancer.”

However, Nadella has attempted to turn that notion around. “Today, we are all-in with open source,” Nadella said about the GitHub deal. “When it comes to our commitment to open source, judge us by the action we have taken in the recent past, our actions today, and in the future.”