Amazon and Microsoft, two archrivals in cloud computing and stiff competitors for Seattle-area tech talent, are cooperating a lot more.

Earlier this week, we saw the marriage of Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana.

Then, on Thursday, the companies announced they were teaming up so programmers can more easily take code they manage in Microsoft’s tools, and roll it out on Amazon’s cloud.

On Thursday Microsoft published a blog post detailing the ways in which its Team Foundation Server on-premises software and its Visual Studio Team Services cloud service can hook into various Amazon Web Services tools.

After installing the new tools, developers can upload content to AWS’ widely used S3 storage service, automate the deployments with AWS’ CodeDeploy tool and run apps with the Lambda serverless-computing service, among other things, without leaving the confines of the Microsoft products

To build the integrations, Amazon engineers collaborated with members of Microsoft’s Visual Studio ALM Rangers group, Microsoft program manager Joseph Bourne wrote in the blog post. The ALM Rangers group is tasked with coming up with “out of band solutions for missing features or guidance,” Microsoft has said.

Effectively, Microsoft is providing a new source of revenue for AWS, the biggest cloud around and the main competitor to Microsoft’s own Azure cloud. That’s notable because historically Microsoft has advertised these kinds of integrations as a reason to use Azure.

But if Microsoft is serious about making things as simple as possible for end users, then the move makes sense.

The openness lines up with Microsoft’s recent willingness under CEO Satya Nadella to work with non-Microsoft platforms. For example, Microsoft has made it possible for people to use Linux in its Windows 10 operating system.

At the end of July, Amazon held 34 percent of the cloud infrastructure services market, while Microsoft had 11 percent, according to Synergy Research.

Source: Tech CNBC
Microsoft just made it easier for programmers to use archrival Amazon's cloud