Ehh, I worked there on online services before Azure even existed and it would have been career suicide and an enormous legal fight to use anything outside MS's

Ehh, I worked there on online services before Azure even existed and it would have been career suicide and an enormous legal fight to use anything outside MS's stack--IIS, MSSQL, COM & C++, then .NET. Hotmail got away with it for some years because they were an acquisition.