AWS Open Source Blog

AWS Joins the .NET Foundation

Fred Wurden, General Manager of AWS Windows and Enterprise
and Norm Johanson, Senior Software Dev Engineer, AWS SDKs and Tools

.NET Foundation

We’re excited to announce today that AWS is joining the .NET Foundation as a corporate sponsor. AWS has a long-standing commitment to .NET, with a decade of experience running Microsoft Windows and .NET on AWS. Joining the .NET Foundation is a natural step for us to further invest and participate in this community.

The .NET Foundation is an independent organization run by a board of directors made up of fellow .NET community members. The foundation is working to foster innovation with .NET and support open source projects. The .NET Foundation is critical for enabling the community, and we are enthusiastic to be joining the foundation to help advance the community. AWS understands how important it is to not simply join the foundation but to embrace and advance the foundation’s goals. We take our responsibility to the community seriously. AWS will continue to listen to the customer, increase investments, and make contributions to the community

A few words from Norm Johanson, AWS’ representative to the .NET Foundation:

Fred and I have a long history building scalable, high performance systems. I’m excited to represent AWS in the .NET Foundation. Joining the .NET Foundation as a Corporate Sponsor is an important moment in AWS’s journey – a journey that extends back to 2008.

I remember when .NET 1.0 was first coming out; I was so excited for the future of what could be built. I joined AWS in 2010 to lead the .NET development effort at AWS. AWS understood the importance of .NET, and the AWS SDK for .NET was actually the first unified AWS SDK to be released by AWS in November of 2009. Since then I have had the chance to work with countless members of the .NET community through GitHub, Twitter, and speaking at conferences to help them build on AWS, and to get a better understanding of what .NET developers expect from AWS.

During the time .NET Core was in early development, we knew this was the future of .NET. We quickly started building support for .NET Core and were able to add support during the early betas of .NET Core. We also released the first AWS Lambda .NET Core runtime for serverless applications just a few months after .NET Core 1.0 was released. Like the .NET Foundation, we know it is important to do this work in the open, so the AWS .NET team works openly on GitHub at github.com/aws/dotnet with the libraries and tools we build.

A few words from Fred Wurden, General Manager of AWS Windows and Enterprise:

Many people don’t realize how long ago we started and how high our commitment level has been across AWS to deliver a great .NET experience for our customers. Norm is the perfect representative from AWS to guide and represent the effort of many engineers across AWS in supporting the .NET Foundation. Our customers have deep and long-standing investments in .NET. They tell us they expect AWS to fully support their journey to modernize systems, databases, and applications as they transform their businesses on the cloud. Our sponsorship of the .NET Foundation is an important step to extend our commitment to .NET customers.

AWS will continue to listen to the customer, increase investments, and make contributions to the community. We look forward to working with the .NET Foundation, the .NET community at large, and our .NET customers to support the future of .NET.

Norm Johanson

Norm Johanson

Norm Johanson has been a software developer for more than 20 years developing all types of applications. Since 2010 he has been working for AWS focusing on the .NET developer experience at AWS. His experience goes back to .NET Framework 1.0 and has been his main development platform since. These days Norm is focused on combining the power of AWS and .NET Core to help .NET developers modernize their applications. You can find Norm on Twitter at @socketnorm