If you look at Microsoft's strategy and efforts, you will learn that Microsoft always goes by the cloud-first strategy.

Everything that Microsoft builds and develops is first made for Azure and Microsoft's other cloud offerings. Nearly every feature or product that Microsoft develops originates in Azure or M365.

Examples of these cloud-born products are Windows Server 2016 and Exchange 2018. Features such as Storage Spaces Direct, Hyper-V containers, Hyper-V shielded VMs, and storage replication, as well as new features, such as zero downtime patching, were first tested and proven in Azure. 

The best example of this technological strategy is Storage Spaces Direct. Microsoft never used SAN in their Azure environment; they still stored everything on the local disk. With the general availability of persistent storage for virtual machines, back in 2012, Microsoft mastered Storage Spaces Direct, and from then on, it has implemented it into the Windows server platform.