Not true at all. "So you basically need to buy windows and visual studio to work with Azure" Comes with BizSpark (http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/5/4

Not true at all. "So you basically need to buy windows and visual studio to work with Azure" Comes with BizSpark (http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/5/4/15454442-CF17-47B9-A65D-DF84EF88511B/Products_by_Benefit_Level.xlsx http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/5/4/15454442-CF17-4... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5246500 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5246500) "if you are not into windows centered development, Azure is not that interesting ." You can use their website to set everything up. I did it from my iMac. As a simple test: http://niggler.azurewebsites.net/ http://niggler.azurewebsites.net/ <-- this is using their Heroku-like offering. You push to a git endpoint. http://niggler.cloudapp.net:1337/ http://niggler.cloudapp.net:1337/ <-- this is using a ubuntu VM running in their AWS-like offering. Both are running the nodejs script: var http = require('http'); var port = process.env.PORT || 1337; http.createServer(function(req, res) { res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' }); res.end('Stop niggling!\n'); }).listen(port);