I don't disagree with anything you are saying here, but I was heavily taken back by the statement the author made as it felt right out of the early 2000's, igno

I don't disagree with anything you are saying here, but I was heavily taken back by the statement the author made as it felt right out of the early 2000's, ignoring the last 20 years of Microsoft's shift to services and the cloud. Azure clearly prioritized massively increasing their geographic footprint without the availability zones that AWS almost always deploys when they enter a new region, and I have no doubt they run leaner with less compute available then AWS. When I was on the telemetry team about 3 years ago, we were in the early days of transitioning from the internal only "physical cloud" that the Bing team had created years before into Azure, and it was full of pain for a service our size at that time.