Amazon wins, hands down. You get great Linux support and aren't locked into Microsoft's shady tactics of giving away free stuff to only screw you later.
BizSpark giving away three years of $150/mo Azure credit is shady, but Amazon giving away one year of the free tier is not shady?
That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual Studio, other MS software, so when you are profitable, you pay them through the nose, because you are locked into proprietary anti-open-source bait.
You don't have to use the software licenses to make use of the Azure credits in BizSpark, and Azure will run any Linux distro containing a kernel with Hyper-V support.
Instead you went with a shitty competitor and we're supposed to applaud that?
What's so shitty about Azure again?
Sorry, Azure is still garbage
Why?
and AWS is one of the most advanced and performant cloud platforms available.
Unfortunately, staying in AWS's free tier means never seeing any of that performance.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. Justified or not, Microsoft's history makes it hard for me to trust them.
AWS have wiped over $2000 in excess charges incurred by one of our instances' data transfer - we set up an alert after that - they've been awesome to us and we trust them and are now spending more and more every month.
There are 2 classes of services on AWS: infrastructure and platform. It's important not to confuse them. Infrastructure includes EC2, S3, ELB, and things of that nature. Platform includes Beanstalk, Dynamo, EMR, and things of that nature.
In general, Amazon's infrastructure offerings are explicitly trying to be commodity, and compete as such. E.g. lower cost, minimal lock in. If you configure servers using chef or other configuration system, and if you wrap all your service calls, it's not challenging to move between vendors on the infrastructure level. Check out fog which helps you do just this: https://github.com/fog/fog
Amazon's platform offerings are pretty explicitly trying to build lock in -- explicit in that they're often free (Beanstalk) and really just trying to sell more infrastructure.
Microsoft, and specifically Windows, pursue a platform strategy. Them offering Linux is actually very novel for them, but it's still called WINDOWS Azure, and the word "Windows" has traditionally been synonymous with platform lock in. You write a program for Windows, it runs only on Windows, and you have to pay for Windows.
I'm excited for MS to get fully into the infrastructure business, but I see their offerings as reactionary to Amazon. Big corporate, windows-based companies are needing to do things in the cloud, and have been going to Amazon. I see Microsoft as trying to offer services to prevent them from leaving by letting them buy what they need from MS.
It's hard for me to imagine good reasons to actually start on Azure, though. They're not a price leader (dropping prices always seems reactionary to AWS price drops), they have limited selection of services (vs. AWS), limited people using them (weaker community support), and always seem clueless about the internet (SSL cert outage, anyone?). Unless you're a Windows only developer and can't work on Linux, I really don't know why I would choose them.
PS. Amazon has a startup program you can get in to. When we started on AWS, they gave us $10K in free services. I know $1K is pretty standard, but if you can get validation (investor? incubator?), they'll go higher.
BizSpark giving away three years of $150/mo Azure credit is shady, but Amazon giving away one year of the free tier is not shady?
That's what Bizspark effectively does, gives you free Visual Studio, other MS software, so when you are profitable, you pay them through the nose, because you are locked into proprietary anti-open-source bait.
You don't have to use the software licenses to make use of the Azure credits in BizSpark, and Azure will run any Linux distro containing a kernel with Hyper-V support.
Instead you went with a shitty competitor and we're supposed to applaud that?
What's so shitty about Azure again?
Sorry, Azure is still garbage
Why?
and AWS is one of the most advanced and performant cloud platforms available.
Unfortunately, staying in AWS's free tier means never seeing any of that performance.