If you want to use Microsoft Software, BizSpark is great. I've signed up a couple times for a couple different entrepreneurial endeavors of mine. Super easy. Always free.

"Deploy a Linux VM on Azure. Azure supports a wide range of Linux distributions including Ubuntu, CentOS, Oracle Linux, Chef and Puppet."

Doesn't sound very reassuring. Do they have a good track record with non-MS stacks?

My experience has been positive.

Their team has been doing good work. For example, Azure had the first/best Docker integration of all the cloud providers. What they had was superseded by docker-machine and swarm eventually, but they were definitely thinking ahead of the curve.

As a user of Azure, I admit that find some aspects of the service unusual, such as requiring users to pick a globally-unique identifier for every server they boot. As in, they ask you to provide a string for your instance's name, then they provide a hostname based on that string; if the hostname (thus the name you pick) is taken, you'll get an error.

Update: I just noticed that in the past few months, Azure has eliminated this weird DNS thing with the introduction of a revised API and are phasing out the old service as "classic". I'm actually looking at moving some of my infra (containers) to Azure with their Bizspark program which offers a $750/mo credit for startups.

GCN and AWS both have very easy drop in Docker support. I'm not sure how it could get any easier.

Yes, they do, but Azure beat them to offer first-class support and did so with their own Docker-API compatible endpoint. This was back around the first Dockercon in 2014. Rackspace had a similar integration at the time, but I was definitely more impressed by what Azure was doing.

Besides not being very reassuring, its quite expensive. People on HN always want to believe its affordable, I don't get it. Like you can go to the site and see that it's quite an expensive cloud service.

I use Azure for Linux and like it alot. You should try it.

Just out of curiosity, what's not reassuring about Azure, other than the fact that they seem to think Chef and Puppet are Linux distributions?

wut?? Azure is about 30-50% more expensive than AWS or GCN. I look around every time I have a new client, look for yourself.

I think they've just won favor of startups recently because they've been subsidizing their cloud costs. If theres one thing Microsoft has, its business savvy.

I am consistently surprised by Azure pricing when I look to spin new stuff up (luckily I'm not paying for it). Not to mention I lose connectivity to some of my v12 sql databases randomly.

well to be sure not to get locked in then.

It is not only expensive, it is also really slow. If you want a VM that compares to a 10$ droplet (i.e. with SSD) you are paying five times that.

You can sign up for bizspark without a registered company?

yes, did that, got accepted.