Shortly after joining Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. the Apache Software Foundation board elected Gardler to act as President of the foundation. In 2015 Microsoft Open Technologies was merged into Microsoft and Ross moved to a team delivering open source on Azure. He was the founding Program Manager on the Azure Container Service which, in 2016 attracted Brendan Burns, a co-founder of Kubernetes as lead architect. In 2017, the container startup company Deis was acquired to add significant technical strength to the team. Throughout his work at Microsoft Ross has continued to be fully engaged with open source projects and often speaks on the topic of innovation through open source at key events around the world.