"Migrating from DO/AWS/Linode isn't fun and productive." Huh? You can run more or less the same type of services on Azure that you can on AWS. I wouldn't even consider DO due to lack of load balancers and file backup services.
Sorry, should have clarified. Most early stage startups don't do DevOps or sysadmin well. Imagine the typical YC startup where its just 2-3 developers who are comfortable with the command line, but not comfortable with Chef, Puppet, etc. Having to plan a migration is not fun or productive for a set of developers because it means (1) less time for them to focus on mobile/web development (2) learning to do sysadmin when it's out of their comfort zone.
AWS and Azure are great, but when things get complicated, it means having good resources to help is critical.
note - from what I know, most early stage YC companies just use Heroku to solve many of these problems anyway.
Actually Microsoft has not one but two Platform-as-a-Service offerings:
- Azure Cloud Services (PaaS)
- Azure Websites (PaaS light)
Unfortunately, when I last looked at it two months ago, both of them were quite unattractive, at least for Python hosting.
First of all, they have no support for automatically installing python dependencies, i.e. no support for pip. If you want to install e.g. django-rest-framework, you have to install it locally and then manually copy the installed files to Azure (with FTP, if I remember correctly).
Secondly, they both run Python on a Windows Server running behind the IIS web server. Besides the fact that you will walk along the road less travelled (Django is overwhelmingly deployed on Linux), there is a very concrete limitation: if you want to install binary packages (e.g. PIL or Pillow), you have to manually compile them for Windows (and of course copy them manually to your Azure server). Yuck.
If you want to use Azure, go with their IaaS offering (Azure Virtual Machines) and stay away from their PaaS offerings.
Wild... didn't know that. I've been doing mostly node with some C# for the past 3 years... just double checked MS WebMatrix and nope, doesn't look like Ruby is in the box...
Sure, but in practice if you have any complexity in your stack then it's going to be a PITA to from Azure to AWS (or vice-versa).
If you're just running instances then maybe it's not too much work - though you're still going to have to think about backup / restore, access control, autoscaling (maybe), cost tracking / allocation, etc...
I'm sure Microsoft are banking on a profitable percentage of YC companies becoming so wedded to that Azure systems that the opportunity cost of switching to AWS is too high.
I've found this to be very untrue - digital ocean offers very poor performance per $ compared to linode in my experience. Linode don't have a $5/month option but if you pay $10/month or more you will get a lot better performance at Linode
Perhaps, perhaps not. You could argue that choosing not to enable data scrubbing was a deliberate decision by DO to place cost savings (simpler / less costly not to scrub SSDs and saves cell wearing) over security, wheras linode was just the victim of a targeted attack and were unlucky but are overall more competent. Or perhaps not.
In short, unless you have inside information, there is not enough information to determine which company is more competent or more trustworthy - it's not possible to judge which company you should trust with your business based on the available facts in an objective way currently, as the available data is easily attributable to simple bad luck.
I do have some third-hand insider information that implies that Linode's management/billing/etc systems are old and buggy, which colors my judgement.
Regardless, I don't see how you can judge someone who's had at least two breaches more competent than someone who had zero. In all probability, DO didn't have any breaches precisely because they are more competent.
