Given some recent comments by Jason Zander, Microsoft’s executive vce president for Azure, it’s worth repeating: If you have a choice to make between superior technology and superior community, take the community option. Every. Single. Time. While tech supremacy is somewhat subjective, it’s nearly always fleeting in the face of community development.
Yet that is precisely what Microsoft is doing with Azure Kubernetes Service.
Zander is no dummy. As the person responsible for Azure, he’s helping spark a renaissance in that business that sees an ever-growing horde of developers build applications there.
With all the good he’s doing for developers, I should probably give him a pass on comments he made at Microsoft’s Future Decoded conference in London recently. But I won’t, given that it reflects a persistent myth worth addressing.
Zander was doing fine until he started touting Azure Service Fabric, a Microsoft-developed container orchestration solution that rivals Google’s Kubernetes: “They are both first-class solutions,” he allowed,” but some first-class solutions are more first-class than others, it seems. He continued,
If you’re looking for a container orchestrator, especially if you want the integration with the open source community, Kubernetes is an awesome solution for that. What we’ve tried to do with AKS [Azure Kubernetes Service] is to make that first-class, we’ll do the management for that.
