Amazon Web Services joins Google in paying lip service to Microsoft's .NET platform

With the hope of running more enterprise applications

AWS has joined the .NET Foundation as a Corporate Sponsor, which means the cloud giant gets a seat on the Foundation's Advisory Council as well as helping to fund the foundation's activities.

The .NET Foundation is strongly associated with Microsoft, the company that created the .NET platform, and it is only in the last five years that .NET and associated languages like C# and F# have officially become cross-platform thanks to the official open-source implementation, .NET Core.

AWS competes with Microsoft Azure in public cloud, and although AWS is a long way ahead in terms of market share, there is understandably a perception that Azure is the natural home for Windows and .NET workloads. AWS is largely built on Linux.

This is a perception that AWS is keen to address, which is no doubt why the company, in its public embrace of the .NET Foundation, emphasises its support for .NET Core in services like AWS Lambda.

Joining the .NET Foundation is a way for AWS to increase its visibility in the .NET community as well as being well placed to fix any issues with .NET Core on AWS.

Becoming a corporate sponsor is relatively inexpensive and will cost AWS just $50,000 annually, according to this post. Despite this, there are only 10 such sponsors listed on the foundation's site, though the other names include Google, Microsoft, Red Hat and Samsung.

From the perspective of the .NET Foundation, it could do with a few more as it still looks firmly Microsoft-centric. ®