if you are in the situation to need dedicaded VMs for MariaDB then you should probably go for SQL Azure. Here this is not the case, the requirements for the DB

if you are in the situation to need dedicaded VMs for MariaDB then you should probably go for SQL Azure. Here this is not the case, the requirements for the DB are minimal and we already have 2 VMs running for the availability set. As I said, at the end you need to judge based on the specific needs of your app/product.