I tried Windows Azure recently - their cloud storage option to be specific. I was shocked to find out that they did not even have a UI for simple operations like uploading to the bucket etc. Yes, I know they're targeting developers, but I just can't be doing big XML REST requests for every thing. I also couldn't close my account without raising a support request.

The point being - Microsoft's biggest headache is catching up with AWS on the tooling and documentation. They seem to be going all out in competing with every vertical that AWS has, but that might not be the best approach as they might endup spreading themselves too thin.

I wish Microsoft would hurry up and open their Australian regions [1]. The government department we work with "does not support the storage of information ... outside Australia [2]".

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/12/microsofts_australia...

[2] http://docs.education.gov.au/system/files/doc/other/policy_o... (page 3)

All of this causes people to get the wrong idea about AWS.

People aren't attracted to AWS because it is cheap, they are attracted to it for other reasons. When I left Softlayer, the retention specialist I talked to told me that AWS didn't give me free bandwidth, but I told him I wasn't worried about bandwidth costs on AWS because these scaled with my revenue and were a small fraction of it.

One kind of interesting thing about Azure's compute pricing is that stopped VMs are free. You can pause a VM, deallocate it (which removes it from infrastructure like IP addresses / node allocation / etc. and puts it into cold storage), and not pay anything until you restart it. But when you restart it's in its previous configured state. AFAIK the only way to do that with other cloud or VPS providers is to dump a custom image and then boot off the new image. For some uses that's fine, but for other uses having an interface more like pausing/unpausing a VMWare instance, with persistent state rather than fresh provisioning via configuration management tools, is nicer.

I kind of like Azure and its management portal that makes it easy to setup and manage all their services, but I find the costs to be too high. An Extra small VM (1GHz CPU, 768MB RAM) runs at US$15/month without considering the additional cost of data transfer, storage transactions and storage cost. Compare that to DigitalOcean with their US$5/month for their equivalent offering.

What draws me to Azure is the fact that MS have datacenters where I live.

Does anyone know if Microsoft's Blob Storage can be used for static web site hosting like Amazon's S3 can be? I'm talking about the full experience that S3 offers. That includes selecting the index page filename, and the DNS support so that naked domains (like example.com) can be used directly instead of having to use a CNAME (like for www.example.com) and some redirection service for the naked domain. Azure's support for this was not very good at all the last time I looked and the information available about it today is outdated by several years or isn't encouraging.

"Your margin is my opportunity" - Jeff Bezos

Such is life when competing against anything Amazon. Price is feature of their product, just like UI, etc. If they find a way to make it cheaper - they will.

Looks like amazon might be afraid that Dropbox has plans to potentially build their own server infrastructure.

I love this sort commoditization and competition.

I have a plugin for chrome that replaces the word "cloud" with "butt", this article was extremely confusing.