As open-source becomes more and more a part of competitive tech enterprises, the insular nature of legacy architectures and environments is showing more and more cracks in its foundations. As such, helping businesses transition away from those old forms and into modern ones is becoming a business focus in and of itself for some of the larger institutions.

At the recent KubeCon event, Brendan Burns, partner architect at Microsoft, and Ross Gardler, principal program manager at Microsoft, met with John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about containers, open-source and the effect of cloud adoption on various businesses.

Freedom and openness

As Gardler explained, customer freedom is a significant driver of tech decisions these days, as companies seek ways to make their apps and services appealing enough to bring users in without relying on proprietary formats or other means of “locking in” those users. As one example, “Open-sourcing the tooling that we use internally to build Azure container service means that we can work much more closely with customers in the community,” Gardler noted.

And building closer relationships with customers can enable better understandings of what to build, what markets to target and so on, Burns acknowledged. “I think the real reason why the open-sourcing [took so long] wasn’t because we weren’t going to, it’s because we wanted to find a good reason to do it, and a good reason really is to build that community around it,” he stated.

Burns stated that “finding the place where people who have shared interests can collaborate” is a big key to unlocking the potential of both open-source and customer engagement. Instead of building the same app or product several different ways, he said, it allows those efforts to be unified, with discussion and concerted revisions speeding and enhancing the development process.

Shutting out lock-in

But with those benefits come a number of changes to which companies will have to adjust. “I think it’s very clear … that cloud, and open-source on cloud, means that users are not gonna accept lock-in. It’s just not part of the game anymore,” Burns stated.

In his eyes, customers have come to expect a portability to their work and data, so that if a particular platform isn’t working for their needs, they can take their existing work and port it to another, better-suited environment. “It’s a great challenge, honestly, because it makes us build a better cloud platform,” Burns said.

And as those expectations solidify across the industry, legacy environments that can’t meet those needs are becoming even more vulnerable to replacement. “Those legacy customers need to be looking at the hybrid environments, moving into cloud, as well as dealing with their legacy and the past,” Gardler said. “And we have to help them on that road … we’ve got to build the best solution for our customers.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of KubeCon 2016. (*Disclosure: The Linux Foundation and other companies sponsor some KubeCon 2016 segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither The Linux Foundation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE