I've been using azure a bunch at work. I don't know where the sales numbers come from. I have reasons for being skeptical after being in on conversations with t

I've been using azure a bunch at work. I don't know where the sales numbers come from. I have reasons for being skeptical after being in on conversations with their sales reps. I hate how they hide important details about their systems. The shroud of mystery is really infuriating. Useful bits in terms of performance metrics just aren't there or just aren't visible. I've used Amazon's services and Rackspace's services as well. I've had mixed experiences with all of them. I honestly feel that I'd be getting work done much quicker if I was just handed a vmware portal and managed VMs in a datacenter to implement our systems. It's very nice when you're able to SSH into a system and run top or other tools to see what's going on. Running queries or checking out charts that show data at hourly intervals is next to useless. As an added bonus, I wouldn't have to stop queries and go up to the application layer and reconnect to another shard in order to continue my query. I honestly don't know what's so appealing about Azure. Maybe devs these days don't know how to ping a server or set up a database. If it weren't for getting tons of free cash to start, we'd be on about 1/10th the "budget" using other services. But it's hard to beat free. Would I ever pay for it? Yes. But only in the situation where I had a bunch of sub-par developers. Id also be looking for an out from the company while getting patted on the back for going with MS.