I should check that again, it's been awhile.
But it depends on your platform. Its an unpopular but somewhat verifiable fact that the Windows kernels have much more powerful async I/O support and when software targets that, it is very fast compared to linux counterparts. If your toolkit supports this, then a strong argument can be made that you don't really care so long as SSH works. Powershell is serviceable for maintenance and most deploys are fairly agnostic to other aspects of the platform.
I've been doing skunkworks projects. I tried to get some stuff working in GCE and their docs are a mess and it never worked. Azure has some warts in its git push deploy stuff, but it worked the first time and I managed to diagnose the other issues.
async DISK I/O
Also, you tend to be getting more per instance hour on both Azure and GCE, assuming you do things those environments are good at. In Azure's case if you can get your software running on windows then it's actually quite good performance for I/O intensive things.