OpenAI and Microsoft (opens in new tab)

Much of the cheaper comes when you get the large enterprise discounts (versus amazon). Those don't last forever though. Their offering is definitely far more immature, but they are making constant improvements. They tend to be leveraging lot of ML stuff in the security/management space as well, which is pretty interesting (they have a vast trove of threat intel from the millions of MS defender and O365 type deployments).

Microsoft probably offered them a really sweet deal (read: tons of Azure credits), in exchange for the press/marketing.

Amazon is pretty stingy with those kinds of things, so they are very Jeff Bezos when it comes to startup credits and the like.

The "open" name is telling, OpenAI's work should be agnostic of platform, and they shouldn't be pitching others' proprietary systems in public like this.

That's the point. This is only getting attention because it's OpenAI.

I've been using Azure in various forms since beta days. Back then it felt very startup-like with half baked software and updates coming all the time. That is still how their new stuff is delivered, but I've rarely had issues with anything that is out of preview.

Here what really sold Azure to me, the various companies I've worked for, etc. Azure allows you to do just about anything these days, and you can mix & match all sorts of different pieces of tech as you see fit, and its all the in one place. It's quite important for businesses that I have, for example, probably half a dozen ways to open a connection into my corporate network in order for my front end Azure-hosted API can access some ancient database. Microsoft knows how to make Azure appeal to businesses, since that is their bread and butter.

One last thing: where I currently work we have been running or entire infrastructure on Azure since day 1. We have to architect our applications for the cloud, but the benefits have always been amazing. Whenever we get bigger customers that slam our infrastructure with traffic, we just push a button (or automatically) and we get more machines/bandwidth/storage, etc. Not once has there been feelings of regret for choosing Azure in the company. It's a safe bet.

I mostly use Azure for hobby/small/exploratory work, but I'm generally quite happy with it, sticking mostly to their PAAS offerings, and a Linux VM here and there. I never touch their UIs, which are terrible indeed. But the CLI tools do everything and I'm pretty happy with those.

This. I get $150 credit with my MSDN account but it never gets used because paying for AWS is a better deal than dealing with Azure.

Azure feels like Microsoft wrote it. Clunky, slow and unreliable.

I'm currently working on an azure based project where we have scripted all of our deploys in powershell. Pretty quick that way and that also means you dont have to deal with UI

I don't think the problem was resource availability. Some of my students attempted to start t2's because we weren't going to be doing particularly heavy calculations in this class, and were rejected.