Microsoft has supported Linux on Azure for years now. Why would they treat FreeBSD worse than Linux?

The only "evil" that I've experience with Linux is that Microsoft has price parity between Windows & SUSE Linux on Azure, which is competitive for Windows but a premium price for SUSE Linux (and an extra premium price for RedHat Enterprise).

Linux without a support contract should always be cheaper than Windows because that's the reality with the license costs. Microsoft's competitors are far cheaper for Linux VMs, but if you're willing to pay the premium it runs fine on Azure, and performs better than Windows on the same hardware (although the gap is smaller if you run Windows headless, using Windows Core).

I mean, for SUSE or RHEL you can just build your own image and BYOL. There's no need to use the standard images. Anyway, if your infrastructure is static enough that the per hour licensing costs don't make sense then why are you even using Azure/AWS/whatever instead of running inside your own DC?

Every time our IT Director talks about Azure I want to cringe, our infrastructure is relatively static and only grows - so it's straight up MORE expensive to put anything there (and this factors in power and cooling to the datacenter).

Hotmail ran on FreeBSD for a long time. Why would they treat it anyway than Linux?

MS has every incentive to ensure that their Operating systems get the best hardware and show they are the more stable and scalable.

I wouldn't trust an operating system company that runs a "server farm" where they have their own OS and competitors. Why would Microsoft run their competition on their own hardware & data centers? If Azure breaks off from MS and becomes an independent company, OS agnostic, then maybe they can win my trust back.

I like Azure & would only use it for MS based OS, DB etc. I would never run, nor would I recommend any other OS running on Azure, ever. There are other "server farm" vendors that I can choose from for non MS based cloud computing.

I don't think there's a single blue badge (old colloquialism for "Microsoft employee") that believes BSD and nix are "competitors". Why wouldn't Azure run other OSes? It's not a virtualized Windows hosting service, it's a virtualized OS hosting service.

Agreed on other points made on this thread regarding pricing, though.

Because it's a commoditized market. MS knows damn well that if Linux, etc were shown to be significantly slower on Hyper-V/Azure than on other platforms, they wouldn't get subscribers. Bang for the buck is an important factor in business decisions, and there are a ton of other providers out there to keep MS honest.