I'm not a YC company but will share one man's opinion about Azure. We started using it because we have one piece of software in our stack that only runs on Windows, so we have a Windows VM and a couple Linux VM's running everything else. We're early in the life of the company so we're pretty much just using it for basics, but as a platform it's been fine. My dev ops guy seems to have few complaints on a day to day basis.

The one area we've consistently had real issues is with static IP persistence and VM location. At times, between our portal and an RDP session I've seen up to 3 different IP's for the same VM. Our VM's invariably lose their static IP's during reboots, which is a real nightmare because some of our vendors require IP white listing. We also can't seem to confirm that our servers are geographically where they're supposed to be. If we try to geolocate a server in US-West, we variously see it in other parts of the country, or even the world.

I'm reasonably seasoned in Azure, though far, far from an expert. But it sounds like you need to set up a Reserved IP in Azure, that should solve your problem. You'll need PowerShell to do this. (tut: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/reserved-ip-addresses...)

I think you can do this from the Azure CP now, I am not 100% sure.

Your IP should not flush on reboot though, that should theoretically only occur if you're doing cold boots/shutdowns; but that's a no-no in any cloud environment unless you have a reserved IP; which is why you are encouraged to use cnames instead for domain management, etc.

As far as the region problem, this can happen if you're using something like a scale set or load balancers. That could throw off a trace route. Also making sure your storage account, etc are all in the same region is fairly important.

Are you assuming that only YC company employees use Hacker News as a news source? Google gets just as much airtime as Microsoft and Amazon here, and Google is vastly smaller (as of right now) in their cloud business.

No I'm assuming a lot of the Startup and YC community here are overwhelming using AWS which is why I expect AWS stories would be more relevant. I just see a lot of manufactured hype around Azure and not many well-known Startups using it.

I wish I had a screen shot but the post had 42 up votes and did not have a single comment. Am I the only person that finds that a bit odd?

42 is an even number.