They lost to the search engine.
I think Microsoft have waken up and realize they need to be active in all spaces that open source is at. It seems like this moves will help their cloud business since there are so much money in there.
Supposely their Azure cloud is doing well and I guess they need to keep at it.
I agree that they're not doing it for the pure of their heart but rather it's money driven and fear of being left behind again.
"Oh and these Kubernetes features only work on Azure Cloud(tm) running Windows Server(tm), or Microsoft Linux(tm)."
I don't know.. does anyone that isn't a .net shop use Azure? It seems if you are a .net shop, Azure is the best choice. If you are not a .net shop, why use Azure? If Microsoft is going to reach a compelling chunk of AWS and GCE linux developers, I don't think they are going have that easy of a time...
I understand that Azure is competitive on price, and they do support all of the linuxy things you'd expect from AWS or GCE.
Unfortunately all that comes at the expense of reliability from what I've seen. :/
Like I said, I cannot imaginable that many non .net shops would touch azure. It has neither the features of AWS, nor the magic of GCE.