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 :(