Though they advertise & promote Azure as PaaS, you can actually use it for IaaS. They offer a Virtual Machine role which is the rough equivalent of an EC2 instance. I think most folks go the PaaS route though.

VMRole still isnt IaaS, since it doesn't have the equivalent of EC2's EBS backed instance storage. The Azure drive is close, but still not the same. So if you need persistence on the instance storage, you'll still have issues.

I hear it's coming though.

Very true. It is my understanding though that the primary use case of the VM role is to allow legacy applications to sit in the cloud without needing to rebuild for the Azure platform.

My point entirely.

My company uses IaaS to develop SaaS platforms or are they PaaS. Hmm. Sounds like bullshit.

I'd love to see a Venn diagram that actually defines these marketing terms.

IMHO computers is computers.

Exactly - Azure is more like Google App Engine than AWS.