I still think containers are great, and I really like the abstractions kubernetes provides, but if I ever had enough traffic to worry about scaling, I envision running a small cluster of very powerful computers rather than 100s of weak ones.
So basically, through careful engineering, they can run stackoverflow.com, one of the top-ten sites in the world, on a single web server and a single database server. Beefy machines for sure, but it kind of takes the air out of the web-scale hype balloon.
I don't know about the rest of the (initial) team, but Joel was lead on Excel as I recall. If you have a group if devs that know the nt kernel, SQL server and iis very well - why would you not use the ms stack?
Don't get me wrong, I prefer Linux and Free software myself - but that doesn't mean the thousands of Man years sybase and ms have spent on their stack is wasted effort.
