The transition of Microsoft Azure to a Kubernetes-based platform has given it an interesting capability that it’s slowly starting to turn into a competitive advantage: Azure is now portable.
We’re already seeing some aspects of that portability in Azure’s edge solutions, based on Azure Arc and Azure Stack, and in the abilities to push containerized Azure Cognitive Services to edge hardware and to run serverless functions outside the cloud. A portable cloud offers a great deal of flexibility, with cloud native development models scaling from single-board Raspberry Pi computers to global distributed systems running across multiple geographies.
