Having used their Linux offerings in 2012 - the only thing that I can say is whilst Azure does provide good performance for the price. You lose out on stability, sanity and on choice.

I know the cloud is supposed to be a place where the servers are volatile ... BUT ... random reboots with non-writeable disks when they come back as well as network connectivity problems between servers are not something that I've experienced at Rackspace or AWS.

The support at Azure is pretty laughable ("what's a public key?" from one of their so-called TCP/IP experts) if you manage to get a phone call with the folks over at Redmond. Otherwise all you have is forum support where you are basically treated like an idiot and blamed for their mistakes unless you can prove otherwise.

The Windows offering is a little better, more stable for sure - but, then you run into crazy firewall issues if you are using something like AzureRunMe to do the work and set-up bespoke web app servers.

For what i spent the best part of a month failing at getting set up at Azure, took me a few days to set up at Rackspace, with configuration management and service monitoring.

I wont be rushing back to use Azure again any time soon and be warned that this benchmark is only a small glimpse at what is otherwise a mighty shit sandwich.