Microsoft does not need to shift a single Azure Linux customer to the MS stack to make money on Azure. This was a major mindset breakthrough at MS that Nadella

Microsoft does not need to shift a single Azure Linux customer to the MS stack to make money on Azure. This was a major mindset breakthrough at MS that Nadella is not responsible for, but has leaned into. MS is not a Windows company anymore, they are back to being a software company. And Linux is fine software. AWS delivers most of Amazon’s profit despite Amazon having no proprietary software story to speak of. Well, MS can do that too. EDIT to add that MS does not even sell consulting services, their partners do. I’m sure the “lift and shift” story makes sense to long-standing MS shops, and MS may have even included that in their Azure pitch to them. But ultimately one of the best things about Azure from MS’s perspective is that they don’t need consulting partners to make money from it. They can reach directly into the product and ops teams at major enterprises and sell them raw capability with a spend that auto-scales.