You gain the exact same things as you gain on other cloud platforms. You do not need to worry about the followings:
- data center power
- data center networking
- hardware provisioning
I don't think they are better thn GCE or AWS in terms of Linux support (maybe minor things) but they are not significantly worse either. What comes after that, pricing, machine types etc. is a different question. I see lots of companies using Azure because they got free credit for it.
To me, the more interesting aspect of any of the clouds is the PaaS offerings. I like the idea of not knowing or caring what OS my stuff is running on or how many VMs back it. Throw some Node.js up into a cloud and have it run and scale automatically without me having to harden, patch, and maintain machines. Same with data - flip a switch and have a geo-redundant well managed database service as opposed to configuring and monitoring such a beast myself.
I like Azure Web Apps, Sql, and Storage PaaS offerings, as well as hosted Mongo and similar 3rd party services. In general, my experience is that they are cheaper and better managed than most stuff my customers roll themselves.
I would suggest that any "100% anything" shop look at the PaaS offerings of the various clouds and see if the benefits outweigh the risks.
I don't understand your conclusion (Azure is best?). App Engine is far and away the most battle-hardened PaaS, going from tons of tiny toy apps to the scale of Snapchat.
I don't disagree that having a PaaS and "marketplace" is important, but I don't see how you seem to conclude that GCP is less relevant here.
I'm not sure, but that's why I would want to read a comparison to find out! For example, if their Linux VMs had a price/performance advantage in some category (networking, CPU, whatever), that would be interesting information to know. Or if the tools were better/worse.
I believe GCE has a price/performance advantage in basically all categories against both AWS and Azure (one wrinkle is we don't offer small slices of local SSD, instead pushing people to either our 375 GiB per unit local SSD or our Persistent Disk SSD product). For example:
That was on conclusion as well. I launched my baby startup on Digital Ocean and moved to GCE when I needed to do things like floating IPs (before DO had such a thing).
Overall GCE has worked well. I did have trouble fighting the beta logging agent (used 300+ MB of ram and 5% of my CPU when under no load), but logging is in beta so I guess I can't complain :)
- data center power
- data center networking
- hardware provisioning
I don't think they are better thn GCE or AWS in terms of Linux support (maybe minor things) but they are not significantly worse either. What comes after that, pricing, machine types etc. is a different question. I see lots of companies using Azure because they got free credit for it.