Well they want to be competitive...
... and seriously with SystemD, many people want to move to BSD... though it's unclear if they then want to go to Azure. In any case, OpenBSD gives them more potential customers than it costs them to make.
Microsoft has extended BSD support in Azure. The company added a FreeBSD 10.3 VM to the Azure marketplace last year, after building and testing an image so that users could feel confident the OS would be officially welcomed and run well in the Redmondian cloud. Now it's added support for OpenBSD 6.1 after collaborating with …
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>Who is the customer for this?
Potential cloud end-users with onsite appliances.
"Look! We can host all your IT - we have VM versions of all your appliances, you can just boot everything up to our cloud."
"Then we'll offer you a free Windows firewall."
"Then we'll make you pay for a Windows firewall." Ooops, did I say that out loud?
What ever happened to the decentralized Internet. What is the point of running BSD in the Redmondian cloud. Don't bother answering, that's a rhetorical question. Or the logic of running a firewall in the Redmondian cloud. I mean anyone who has control of the underlying cloud platform could bypass security.
Upvoted... who knows why you got downvoted?
The problem isn't just with MS though. AWS a larger problem purely because it has been far more successful.
I've heard AWS people say that when they have a problem, a third of all web-sites are affected.
That is stupidly concentrated IT. We are pretty much at the stage of "if one company fails, we are all in trouble."
The internet was designed to be a dumb network with smart end-points (the opposite to the telephone network) but the vendors are rushing back to the IBM mainframe model because that is far more lucrative. We may as well bring back SNA.