If Microsoft is to succeed in making Azure its future, it needs to bring developers to its cloud platform. That would be easy if we were back in the early days of the PC, when it was still possible to build and lock in an ecosystem. But we live in a world were developers have choice, and where they choose the appropriate tools for the tasks at hand, mixing and matching proprietary and open source tools.
Azure’s original platform-as-a-service (PaaS) approach made that hard to deliver, with only a limited number of services supported.