Windows Azure supports a large and growing number of open-source applications, frameworks, and languages, as a result of Microsoft’s collaboration with the open source community. We understand that developers want to use the tools that best fit their experience, skills, and application requirements, and our goal is to enable that choice.
The open-source community also provides many technologies that developers can use to build on Windows Azure. This page lists some of the most popular open-source software available for use on Windows Azure today, and the list will continue to grow in the future.
Apache Ant
Apache Ant is a Java library and command-line tool for driving processes that can be described in build files as targets and tasks. Ant supplies a number of built-in tasks that programmers use to compile, assemble, test and run Java applications; it can also be used effectively to build applications written in languages other than Java, such as C or C++. The Windows Azure Starter Kit for Java (wastarterkit4java.codeplex.com) provides an Ant task extension for building Windows Azure packages.
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ALT Linux
ALT Linux is a linux distribution founded by a Russian software organization. ALT Linux produces various distributions for different purposes, including: desktop for home or office, development, and corporate servers.
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AppFog
AppFog provides a platform as a service (PaaS) infrastructure for web developers that can be hosted on any infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform. Originally targeted at PHP, AppFog now supports PHP, Node.js, Ruby, Python, Java, .NET, MySQL and PostreSQL.
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how to use BlogEngine.NET
BlogEngine.NET is an innovative open source blogging platform developed with ASP.NET.
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CentOS
CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. It is available for immediate deployment on Windows Azure virtual machines.
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Chef
Chef is an open-source systems integration framework that makes it easy to create an elegant, fully automated infrastructure. Chef can be used to automate the configuration and deployment of Linux virtual machines on Windows Azure.
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how to use Chyrp
Chyrp is a blogging engine designed to be very lightweight while retaining functionality. It is powered by PHP and has very powerful theme and extension engines, so you can personalize it however you want.
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Composite C1 CMS
Composite C1 is a developer friendly Web Content Mangement System (CMS) aimed at marketing & communication professionals who need to easily manage corporate website content with a consistent visual identity.
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concrete5
CMS made for Marketing but built for Geeks. concrete5 is a content management system that is free and open source.
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Coppermine
Coppermine is a multi-purpose fully-featured and integrated web picture gallery script written in PHP using GD or ImageMagick as image library with a MySQL backend.
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CouchDB
CouchDB is a database built on web standards such as HTTP and JSON. It offers a JavaScript query language and features such as incremental replication and automatic conflict detection. CouchDB is available to Windows Azure developers as a service from CloudAnt, or developers can deploy their own CouchDB data layer with a simple free installer.
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Debian
The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. This operating system that we have created is called Debian.
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Django
Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.
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Doctrine
The Doctrine Project is a set of PHP libraries that provide persistence services, object relational mapping, and related functionality. Doctrine supports sharding on SQL Database, for highly scalable performance and availability.
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DokuWiki
DokuWiki is a simple to use and highly versatile Open Source wiki software that doesn’t require a database.
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DotNetNuke
DotNetNuke is a .NET-based open-source content management system and web development framework that can be deployed to Windows Azure web sites quickly and easily.
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Drupal
Drupal is a PHP-based open source content management system that is popular for knowledge management and business collaboration scenarios.
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Eclipse
Eclipse is an open-source integrated development environment (IDE) with an extensible plug-in architecture that offers support for many languages, including Java, C, C++, PHP, and Python. The Windows Azure Plugin for Eclipse with Java simplifies the process of building and deploying Java applications to Windows Azure.
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EHCache
EHCache is an open source, standards-based cache used to boost performance and improve scalability for data-intensive Java applications.
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Git
Git is a free open source distributed version control system (DVCS) that has become popular for managing open-source projects ranging from one to thousands of developers. Windows Azure web sites support application deployment via the Git push protocol.
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Hadoop
Hadoop is a framework that enables the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers by using a simple programming model. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage. The Developer Preview for the Apache Hadoop- based Services for Windows Azure is available by invitation.
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Hibernate
Hibernate is an open-source object relational mapping (ORM) solution for Java developers. Hibernate handles mapping between Java classes and database tables as well as mapping between Java data types and SQL data types.
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JBoss
JBoss is an open-source Java EE application server for any operating system that supports Java, including Windows Azure. It offers support for JSP, servlets, JDBC, SOAP, caching, clustering, and many other features.
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Jenkins
In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 400 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.
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Jetty
Jetty is an open-source web server and Java servlet container with support for Web Sockets, OSGi, JMX, JNDI, JASPI, AJP and many other integrations. Jetty can be embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters.
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Joomla
Joomla is an easy-to-use and extensible open-source content management system (CMS) and blogging platform written in PHP that uses MySQL for data storage. It is available for immediate installation from the Windows Azure web sites gallery.
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how to use Jruby
JRuby is the effort to recreate the Ruby (http://www.ruby-lang.org) interpreter in Java. The Java version is tightly integrated with Java to allow both to script any Java class and to embed the interpreter into any Java application.
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how to use Liferay
Liferay is a leading open source portal, web content management and collaboration software package.
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Mageia
Mageia is a GNU/Linux-based, Free Software operating system. It is a community project, supported by a nonprofit organisation of elected contributors. Our mission: to build great tools for people. Further than just delivering a secure, stable and sustainable operating system, the goal is to set up a stable and trustable governance to direct collaborative projects.
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Magento
Magento is the eCommerce software and platform trusted by the world’s leading brands. Grow your online business with Magento!
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Mantis
MantisBT is a free popular web-based bugtracking system. It is written in the PHP scripting language and works with MySQL, MS SQL, and PostgreSQL databases and a webserver.
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Maven
Maven is an open-source build automation tool that can be used to build and manage projects written in C#, Ruby, Scala, and other languages.
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MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a free software open source wiki package written in PHP, originally for use on Wikipedia. It is now used by several other projects of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation and by many other wikis.
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Memcached
Memcached is a free open-source distributed memory object caching system with an API that is available for many programming languages. Memcached is based on an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) that are typically the returned results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.
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mojoPortal
mojoPortal is free open source web content management software for running your website.
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MongoDB
MongoDB is a scalable, high-performance, open source NoSQL database that features document-oriented storage, replication, high availability, auto-sharding, and other features. MongoDB can be deployed to Windows Azure via a simple free installer.
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Moodle
Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.
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MySQL
MySQL is the world's most popular open source database, offering high performance, high reliability, and ease of use. MySQL can be deployed to Windows Azure, and it is also available to Windows Azure developers as a service from ClearDB.
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sign up Neo4J
Neo4j is a robust (fully ACID) transactional property graph database. Due to its graph data model, Neo4j is highly agile and blazing fast. For connected data operations, Neo4j runs a thousand times faster than relational databases.
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Nginx
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev.
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nopCommerce
nopCommerce is an open source e-commerce solution that contains both a catalog frontend and an administration tool backend. nopCommerce is a fully customizable shopping cart. It’s stable and highly usable.
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how to use Open Atrium
Open Atrium is an open source platform designed specifically to make great teams communicate better. An intranet in a box with: a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all. Let’s not forget that it’s also completely customizable.
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Orchard
Orchard is an open source content management system (CMS) that includes shared components for ASP.NET applications as well as applications that leverage those components. It is available for immediate installation from the Windows Azure web sites gallery.
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OpenJPA
Apache OpenJPA is a Java persistence project at The Apache Software Foundation that can be used as a stand-alone POJO persistence layer or integrated into any Java EE compliant container and many other lightweight frameworks, such as Tomcat and Spring.
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OpenSSO
OpenSSO is an open-source project to enable single sign-on. It uses an Identity module that acts as a repository for client certificates and their corresponding users in target applications, which contain integrated Application agents that communicate securely with the identity module.
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OpenSUSE
The openSUSE project is a free open-source Linux distro that can be used on Windows Azure virtual machines.
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phpBB
phpBB is a free open-source bulletin board software platform with an extensive database of user-created modifications and styles that can be used to quickly deploy a customized forum. It is available for immediate installation from the Windows Azure web sites gallery.
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how to use Redmine
Redmine is a flexible project management web application. Written using the Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database.
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ResourceSpace
ResourceSpace is a web-based, open source digital asset management system which has been designed to give your content creators easy and fast access to print and web ready assets.
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Review Board
Review Board is a powerful web-based code review tool that offers developers an easy way to handle code reviews. It scales well from small projects to large companies and offers a variety of tools to take much of the stress and time out of the code review process.
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Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails is an open-source web framework that’s optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration.
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Solr
Solr is a popular high-performance open-source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (for example, Microsoft Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search.
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Spree
Spree is a 100% open source e-commerce platform powered by the popular Ruby on Rails framework. It was designed to make customization and upgrades as simple as possible.
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SpringSource
SpringSource is a popular programming model and application development framework for enterprise Java developers.
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SugarCRM
SugarCRM offers companies unrivaled flexibility to design CRM applications and processes that expose the right information, making more successful partners and happier customers.
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SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) is a Linux distro developed by Novell that offers exceptional stability. It is one of the operating systems available for immediate deployment on Windows Azure virtual machines.
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Symfony
Symfony is an open-source model-view-controller (MVC) web application framework for PHP developers. It can be used together with many other frameworks, and it is often used in conjunction with Doctrine.
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ThinkUp
ThinkUp is a free, open source web application that captures all your activity on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Foursquare.
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Tiki Wiki
Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is a powerful open-source Content Management System (CMS) and Groupware that can be used to create all sorts of Web Applications, Sites, Portals, Intranets and Extranets.
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Tomcat
Tomcat is an open-source implementation of Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies that provides an HTTP web server environment for execution of Java code.
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how to use Typo
Typo is the oldest and most powerful Ruby on Rails blogware, providing custom templates, powerful drag and drop plugins API, advanced SEO capabilities, XMLRPC API and many more.
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Ubuntu
Ubuntu is a Debian-based open-source Linux distro sponsored by Canonical Ltd. It is available for immediate deployment on Windows Azure virtual machines.
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Umbraco
Umbraco is a popular open-source CMS written in C# that can be customized through ASP.NET master pages, XSLT, and C#/.NET development. It is available for immediate installation from the Windows Azure web sites gallery.
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WordPress
WordPress is a popular open-source blogging platform and CMS based on PHP and MySQL. It is available for immediate installation from the Windows Azure web sites gallery.
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X2CRM
X2CRM is a Sales, Marketing and Service application designed exclusively for companies that require a tightly focused customer information system. With special emphasis placed on sales force speed and process optimization, X2CRM is remarkably compact and easy to use, yet incredibly flexible and cost efficient.
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