> "Heh, I know you don't want to talk about Azure, but perhaps others can share -- what's so bad about it?" This is what I will say:

I'm working on a migration to it, so I'm not very experienced with it, but so far, it's been very painful compared to GCE or AWS, in which I've run production stacks. I'd rather not comment further, simply due to my relative new-ness to the service and the chance that it's just lack of experience. The customer service is, at best, run at a glacial pace.

> "It's superior for running Windows at least, right?"

I'm a Linux guy running a platform agnostic Linux stack, but I'd assume so. I get the feeling so far that it's really good if you want to run MS-SQL and .net, and garbage otherwise.

The only reason we're migrating from GCE to Azure is because our GCE credits are expiring, and Microsoft gave us the YC Credits offer for Azure. We'd rather stay on GCE if we could. Also, postgres RDS/CloudSQL is the one thing we miss from AWS

Actually, Azure takes a very strong platform agnostic approach. Over a third of all VMs on Azure are running Linux https://fossbytes.com/33-microsoft-azure-vms-now-run-linux-o..., (supported distributions include Ubuntu, Redhat, Centos, SUSE, Debian, and CoreOS), the Azure Container Service supports 3 open-source orchestrators (Swarm, Kubernetes, DC/OS), and the Azure WebApp PaaS service has Linux support in preview.

Disclosure: I work at Microsoft; opinions are mine.

That's fair and you won't get any arguments from me there. It's very easy to run singleton Linux machines on Azure and I have no complaints there.

I wasn't going to lay it out here, but, as I have your ear:

I'm not saying it's impossible to run a Linux stack on Azure - but man, trying to image the machine, for example, is a whole rigamarole.

Want to run your own image on a scale set? Oh, well, you need to craft a JSON template, by hand. There also appear to be limits on how many machines can run off an image.

ARM is a a mess (IMHO), and it's impossible to select a custom image when creating a new resource group. It also seems (correct me if I'm wrong) impossible to change the vnet of a VM/ARM after it's created. it also seems like ARMs can't share an existing vnet. Again, please, correct me if I'm wrong. I'm new to this service.

I may have to drop to running a bootstrap script to get my stuff working, but the idea of doing a curl | sh is pretty horrific to me, from a security perspective.

Non MS-SQL as a service? Nope.

The new managed disks are very nice. I like those a lot :)

Also, Azure times out my ssh sessions :(

For you ssh sessions, have you tried to use ssh keepalive ? (ex: ServerAliveInterval option on an openssh client)

I've added it to my config yesterday, I hope it helps :) Thanks for the tip!

Your GCE startup credits [1] or something else? Have you been in contact with our PMs about Pgsql?

[1] https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/

Yep, our GCE startup credits. We've only burned through about half of em (from the billing page, it looks like ~45k), and they expire in late march. So if we had an extra year to use 'em, that would be amazing.

When I last chatted with our Account Manager I mentioned Postgres, yeah. We're currently running our own on GCE, but it would be awesome to have it aaS, with replicas and automated backups that I don't have to keep an eye on all the time :).

I don't want to fork the thread to discuss other providers (take a look at GitLab's experience on Azure if you'd like), but I will say that we support Windows Server, SQL Server, .NET, and Powershell throughout GCP [1].

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (so I want to sell you our services).

[1] https://cloud.google.com/windows/