We recently explored putting about 25 of our VMs in Azure. For our workloads, Azure is a worse deal. Broadly, we found that compared to EC2 instance types, you

We recently explored putting about 25 of our VMs in Azure. For our workloads, Azure is a worse deal. Broadly, we found that compared to EC2 instance types, you paid a slight premium of 20% or so to get 2x the RAM and 100s of gigs of ephemeral SSD storage (vs little or no SSD storage), while taking a perhaps 30% hit in CPU performance. It's not terrible, and depending on your workload, might be better than EC2. I'm personally very partial to Amazon's spot instances and t2 family types, neither of which Azure offers. Even so, compute only represents ~25% of our AWS bill. For enterprises who have significant Windows/AD investment, Azure might be a no brainer from an ops cost point of view.