To highlight the adoption of open source tools and techniques by Microsoft, Azure is the best use case to describe here.
Azure clearly has become a multiplatform cloud. Indeed, 25 percent of Azure virtual machines (VM) are now running Linux. As a top note, Azure now supports five Linux servers as VMs: CoreOS, CentOS, Oracle Linux, SUSE, and Ubuntu. Interestingly, Microsoft is in the process of supporting Docker and Kubernetes container management on Windows and Azure platforms.
Technology experts at Microsoft, Mark Russinovich and Jeffrey Snover, started their contribution towards open source Chef, which was highly visible in ChefConf 2015 by Chef Software Inc.
In terms of the .NET platform, Microsoft's twin track is the clear winner of the .NET open source strategy. In this line, the Microsoft mobile development framework now supports Android emulation as well.
In terms of efforts towards industry collaboration, cooperation, and contribution, Microsoft is actively involved in open source consortiums like AllSeen Alliance, OpenDaylight, and R Consortium. Historically, Apache is quite popular for the open source strategy in the industry. Now, Microsoft supports the Apache Software Foundation to encourage open source growth.
Some of the interesting tools and techniques to observe are .NET Core, TypeScript, R Tools for Visual Studio, Azure's Service Fabric, Visual Studio Code IDE, Team Explorer Everywhere for Eclipse, Computational Network Toolkit for deep learning, AIX tools you can use to build AI in Minecraft, and many more.
The next screenshot shows the current tools and technology stack towards Microsoft Open Source Strategy. It covers the end-to-end solution between the infrastructure and DevOps layers. This stack comprises of popular tools like Grunt, Puppet, Chef, Jodiac, Eclipse, Redis, MySQL, Suse, and so on distributed across the multiple layers of an enterprise application framework:
On observing the strategic direction of Microsoft's recent moves, open sourcing effort comprises of PowerShell, Visual Studio Code, and Microsoft Edge's JavaScript engine. During the release of Windows 10, Microsoft partnered with Canonical to bring Ubuntu in the Windows platform for the first time in history. In the cross-platform mobile development space, Microsoft acquired Xamarin to aid mobile app development. It doesn't stop here. They made an effort to make open sourced Xamarin's SDKs for a broader reach in the industry. SQL Server on the Linux platform is on their roadmap too.