SANTA CLARA, California — Microsoft Azure and Cloud Foundry: it’s a marriage made in the cloud. On day one of the Cloud Foundry Summit Silicon Valley, Microsoft said it joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation, the nonprofit that manages the open source cloud application platform.

Microsoft claims to be the fastest growing cloud provider with over 120,000 new customers every month. It’s also a strong open source supporter and belongs to other such groups including the Open Compute Project (OCP) and the Linux Foundation’s Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP).

Microsoft Azure's Director of Compute Corey Sanders said both Microsoft and Cloud Foundry share a commitment to “help organizations modernize their applications without vendor lock-in.”

Cloud Foundry says it has the greatest number of deployments of any cloud application platform in the enterprise, and is used by most Fortune 500 organizations.

About Microsoft joining the foundation as a Gold Member: “We share both a tremendous number of users and a common approach to the enterprise cloud,” said Abby Kearns, executive director of Cloud Foundry Foundation.

Google is a member as well. Adding a second public cloud provider to the group is important because it makes good on its multicloud promise, Kearns said. “Two of the three major public clouds are now part of the foundation, which really reinforces the multicloud story,” she added.

VMware launched the open source project in 2011 as a platform for running enterprise applications in the cloud. It allows companies to deploy these applications to multiple cloud platforms, both private and public, as well as on bare-metal servers, with no changes to the application.

Major brands including Cisco, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Google, IBM, Microsoft, Pivotal, SAP, and SUSE support Cloud Foundry’s open source technology. Many of these companies have built their own cloud platforms on top of the platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

“Cloud Foundry, in a nutshell, is just a highly automated abstraction on infrastructure,” Kearns said. “It adds a thin layer on top of your infrastructure to make it easier for you as a developer to get code out the door faster, and also to give you a consistent experience.”

For enterprise customers, this translates to less time and money spent developing new applications and services.

“All of the technology we do is to support the mission of making enterprise software easier to build,” explained Cloud Foundry CTO Chip Childers.