Azure is twice the price of Google for compute (VM). Azure was really a PaaS and it still shows. They really hope you bring you in on using their software, not just the VM aspect. I'm not overly convinced, but it is probably a decent strategy. Some folks will say "hey I need a message queue" and use Azure's instead of hosting in a VM. Lock in. Azure is even doing this for stuff like Redis, I suppose to get more people on the idea of using hosted software vs machines. In fact their infrastructure offerings are pretty weak (like SSD, or networking).