On the flip side It was painless to use both GCP and AWS and even second tier cloud providers like Digital Ocean or Packet.net are simpler to use then Azure. My standing advice for anyone is only use Azure if you are 100% in the Microsoft ecosystem using .NET and Visual Studio to develop your applications, and you plan on using their professional services to help you out when you hit problems

Azure is mainly for .NET though, but they also have first class support for Node.js, which integrates directly with stuff like application insights.

I use Azure professionally, but I use a range of things personally, and I think I’d never pick anything but Azure for enterprise if my shop was mainly Microsoft. If you aren’t primarily Microsoft, I’d pick AWS.

> At the most basic level performance is way below what I have seen with AWS. It was taking about 20 times longer to load data into a database cluster in Azure then into AWS.

Eh okay. I have a VM running IN Azure which is much faster than one running in AWS.

Google on the other hand are still in the legal grey area, and they’re even more automated than AWS.

I say “won”, because there isn’t a clear monopoly in Europe, and AWS allied themselves with a bunch of lobbying powerhouses like Deloitte and EY, but I’d say Azure is still far ahead.

But that strength is also a weakness. They have at least 3 US Office 365 offerings (Commercial, "Government Community", and Federal). It's harder for them to hit compliance targets, because their customer scope is so huge. The security needs for XBox are different than the Army. I think AWS and in many cases GCP has a better story there.

The support equation is irrelevant.