I'm getting approximately the same CPU & storage performance out of Azure's A0 machine w/Debian8, as from AWS t2.micro instance with spinning rust storage and Debian8 (both are cheapest offer available, and price is quite similar between them).
Network on Azure though is a totally wrecked thing:
- A0 instance is capped to a miserable 5 megabit/s uplink (downlink is fine);
- If you want TCP/UDP ports open, you need to open them one-by-one, going through a 2-page wizard with 8 fields in total to fill in for each port you are opening, and then waiting 15-20 seconds for each "change" to be applied. Good luck opening a 1024-port range for your SIP server;
- You can't open ICMP/GRE/IPSEC or any other custom protocol;
- There are ton of really weirdly configured network gear between your VM and the Internet - packet drops and private IPs in traceroute, etc...
- On a plus side, you can enable so called "direct server return" and you will get incoming packets with your public IP as a destination IP; a really nice feature sorely missing on AWS.
Network on Azure though is a totally wrecked thing:
- A0 instance is capped to a miserable 5 megabit/s uplink (downlink is fine);
- If you want TCP/UDP ports open, you need to open them one-by-one, going through a 2-page wizard with 8 fields in total to fill in for each port you are opening, and then waiting 15-20 seconds for each "change" to be applied. Good luck opening a 1024-port range for your SIP server;
- You can't open ICMP/GRE/IPSEC or any other custom protocol;
- There are ton of really weirdly configured network gear between your VM and the Internet - packet drops and private IPs in traceroute, etc...
- On a plus side, you can enable so called "direct server return" and you will get incoming packets with your public IP as a destination IP; a really nice feature sorely missing on AWS.