[diskopanzer]

My technical focus is on the operation of custom appliances in various (cloud) environments. Therefore, please bear in mind that I have a very limited view of the various functionalities in the cloud environment. The advantage is that I have basically performed the same task in all three environments.

tl;dr: Azure is crap, GCP is mid, AWS is best

Core problems in Azure: 1) opaque IAM policies 2) Slow, unresponsive and bloated frontend 3) Basic tasks such as reboot sometimes take forever 4) When using the azure cli tool, you have completely unusable response times, sometimes simple tasks such as adding or removing IPs to NICs take up to 3 minutes 5) Documentation mostly useless 6) Installation of some bloated Windows tools (e.g. waagent) on Linux appliances (can certainly be avoided, but is probably activated by default, known Microsoft foolishness) 7) Some Microsoft peculiarities also lead to such strange problems that the ssh login is sometimes not possible for 10-40 minutes after a restart of the sshd

I started in Azure and worked with it for about a year, then I worked with AWS for the first time and was thrilled. The syntax of the CLI tool is intuitive and the frontend reacts to CLI commands within seconds. Everything is well documented and I was able to find helpful resources for almost every error I encountered. And by helpful I mean that I had to read ONE article to solve the problem. No comparison to hours of research for any Azure problems.

Google is definitely not bad, especially things like automated network configuration were easier in my experience, but I find the front end more confusing. Overall though, the experience is comparable to AWS.

My only advice: Don't use Azure. I regularly have to suppress the urge to take a bath with my toaster after having to work with it.