Azure is so inexpensive even without BizSpark it's kind of amazing to me. Having done startups in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, what people have available now is incredible IMO.</old man>
Doesn't sound very reassuring. Do they have a good track record with non-MS stacks?
Their team has been doing good work. For example, Azure had the first/best Docker integration of all the cloud providers. What they had was superseded by docker-machine and swarm eventually, but they were definitely thinking ahead of the curve.
As a user of Azure, I admit that find some aspects of the service unusual, such as requiring users to pick a globally-unique identifier for every server they boot. As in, they ask you to provide a string for your instance's name, then they provide a hostname based on that string; if the hostname (thus the name you pick) is taken, you'll get an error.
I think they've just won favor of startups recently because they've been subsidizing their cloud costs. If theres one thing Microsoft has, its business savvy.