Your wording "especially in networking" strongly implies that Azure was worst on several counts, but especially so on networking - but that is not the case, they were only worse on networking.

- On CPU performance, Azure absolutely smashed it! - For storage read and write, Azure came second behind AWS - For TPC-C perf/$ all 4 providers had similar pricing for similar tiers. Note that Cockroach labs say this only takes into account on-demand pricing, so reserved instance pricing may differ