I had a friend who worked as a contractor for one of Microsoft's data centers a few years ago, and the stories he told me about how they run their datacenters was frightening. It sounded like management was out of touch and didn't really have a grasp on what was needed to keep everything running well.
Those stories leave me questioning Microsoft's basic competence in the cloud. While I'm glad to hear that they're improving their service, I just don't see them as being in the same class as AWS, Google, or even some of their smaller competitors such as DO. I would be wary of depending on Azure for anything critical.
If you'd like to share the specific stories this contractor told you, I'd be happy to talk you through it to figure out where your information went wrong.
Again, this was a couple of years ago. Also, I attended an event that MS held to show off Azure, and a large percentage of participants couldn't spin up an instance within 10 minutes, some of them didn't even start up. The MS people running the event had a direct line to some techs in the datacenter, but they still couldn't solve the problems. I talked with some MS partners/users who told me that Azure was terrible in their experience and even some MS execs admitted as much in private conversation. It sounds like Azure has improved since then, but I really have to wonder how much improvement has occured.
