Nobody is running workloads portably across clouds. They're running different things on different clouds and calling it a strategy. Multi-cloud is what happens when nobody's in charge.
I've deployed Kubernetes manifests with both Helm and Kustomize across half a dozen enterprise clients. The debate is tiresome. They solve different problems. Here's when each one actually makes sense.
Everyone adopted Istio because everyone else was adopting Istio. Complex, resource-hungry, and solving problems most teams didn't have — it was the poster child for resume-driven development.
Service Fabric got a lot right — stateful services, the actor model, rolling upgrades with health checks. But it lost the ecosystem war to Kubernetes, and being technically superior wasn't enough to save it.
The Databricks sales demo runs on a public workspace with default networking and an unlimited budget. Your enterprise Azure environment has none of those things. Here's what the gap actually looks like.
The cloud wars are raging. The secret to coming out unscathed is to back open technologies, think carefully about IaaS vs PaaS, and not get locked in while the giants fight it out.