I'm not sure how Azure intends to compete in this space. I've used Amazon, Rackspace, Google Cloud, Azure, and a bunch more.
Professionally, for simplicity I'd choose Rackspace or Google. For Scalability and price I'd choose Amazon. For personal projects I love Digital Ocean.
I dislike Azure's control panel and VM setup, and find their VMs slow. I'd only really consider them if I planned to implement a project that required leveraging the entirety of the Microsoft technology stack.
I can't see technology companies embracing Virtual Windows Server RTs and MSSQL Servers. Startups enjoy technologies that are easy to manage and scale with smaller teams. Enterprise level companies still need inhouse dedicated hardware for security.
Azure is kind of an oddball in the virtual hosting space.
I recently had to compare AWS and Azure for my company. I limited my comparison to AWS c3 and c4 class instances versus mid-range A and D class instances.
My tests are very limited I realise, but it looks to me like the AWS boxes represent better value for the money there, even in the on-demand range. Azure used to offer 6-month and 12-month plans but they removed those. Now you need an enterprise agreement to get anything other than published rates, and you need a big spend to qualify for that AFAICT. AWS reserved instances therefore make their instance rates even more competitive, if those make sense for you.
I sent all this to the company trying to push Azure to us hoping they would have better data to refute my simple benchmarks, but they didn't really have any coherent response beyond talking about the "other advantages" of Azure.
Beyond that I looked at the excellent data at https://cloudharmony.com/cloudscores (great site by the way). Their service is not live yet, so I scraped the data into Google Sheets and compared it there. AWS seems to beat Azure on most cases.
(Data entirely owned by Cloud Harmony). Sorry, I can't find a way to let viewers change the filter on the data.
As far as "other advantages go":-
* If you use Win Server 2012 + HyperV in house then there's a good reason to use Azure because of tight integration.
* If you're using SQL Server it's potentially a good fit too. (MySQL on Azure is recommended via a DB as a service they offer from a 3rd party which seems very pricey).
* If you're starting out and are using Visual Studio tooling then the tight integration with Azure Websites, Web Roles and Worker Roles would be pretty nice since the build/test/deploy process would be pretty slick. Re-engineering an existing system to fit the PaaS could be hard, depending on your architecture (it would be for us).
Azure is also about double the price of Google Compute Engine. And GCE offers much faster processors, from my quick tests. But no matter which way you slice it, Azure is much more expensive, even with a discount for commitment.
AWS might be slightly less, but I've found it more complicated to determine pricing. Plus AWS locks you in to specific instances (more or less) whereas Google just automatically applies it, nice and easy.
Of course I'm nervous about using Google for anything, but they have a very impressive offering.
If you're using MS stack, their web app hosting is really easy to use. One-click publish from VS and auto-running migrations are pretty handy if you want to focus on delivering some prototype fast, rather than mucking around with various admin and deployment tools. I think it's a good selling/entry point for some of their services.
Also, do competing services have anything similar to MS's machine learning services?
I've found the network drives to be oddly slow, but the machines otherwise to perform well. So they can be performant if you can run I/O-intensive stuff off the ephemeral local storage, especially on one of the SSD instances.
Professionally, for simplicity I'd choose Rackspace or Google. For Scalability and price I'd choose Amazon. For personal projects I love Digital Ocean.
I dislike Azure's control panel and VM setup, and find their VMs slow. I'd only really consider them if I planned to implement a project that required leveraging the entirety of the Microsoft technology stack.
I can't see technology companies embracing Virtual Windows Server RTs and MSSQL Servers. Startups enjoy technologies that are easy to manage and scale with smaller teams. Enterprise level companies still need inhouse dedicated hardware for security.
Azure is kind of an oddball in the virtual hosting space.