Don't get me started on the Beta UI vs normal UI. Some things are only supported in one and not the other and vice versa. I'm constantly being flipped back and forth between the two. Also they are both really unpleasant to use. I get lost a lot.
On the flip side, there were some issues with connecting to Azure via the node `mssql/tedious` module, which isn't from MS, and a few developers from MS Azure SQL teams stepped up to track down the issue. Learned a bit more about the TDS protocol than I really wanted to that month.
It seems to me that MS Azure's development department should either implement a 20-40% time for developers to work on the public stuff and/or documentation as developers desire, or have cowboy teams that do. MS isn't likely to spur more open development efforts as most corporate based projects don't inspire much community involvement.
That said, given the choice I might be more inclined to use Joyent, DigitalOcean or Linode for my own stuff... The choice wasn't mine at work, the existing solutions are mostly .Net (some Node) based and Azure was the most pragmatic choice of migration to a hosted solution when that was done almost two years ago. And running anything under Ubuntu VMs with docker on Azure is pretty trivial... Once the next generation infrastracture is in place (a couple months away), it will become easy enough to run anywhere.
That said, I was able to setup a quick little proof of concept web/worker app with node pretty quickly... though you should be aware it is running in a windows host (either 32 or 64bit configurable)... you can include exe/dll's in your package as needed too... I used a git endpoint for deploy, and that worked pretty well. There's apparently a build environment suitable and configured for node_gyp to be able to use.
Though imho it's not as flushed out as App Engine, or bits of AWS... I am able to run dokku on a few hosts... Work's account finally came online for the SSD preview about a month ago... it's definitely worth it.
There's some mishmash of availability... I kind of like that using blob storage, tables and azure queues is as simple as having a storage account... though the node client is a little lacking in documentation and examples.