"These Virtual Machines were recreated by repeating the VM provisioning step. Linux Virtual Machines were not affected."
So Azure supports Linux VMs?! Microsoft does so little Azure advertising that I had to learn this fact from their RCA. Apparently they do support it since 2012: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/micro... but it is likely that many non-users of Azure do not know this.
In fact, something like 20% of Azure is running Linux VMs. Works great, you can use Chef, Puppet, Vagrant, and the open-source cross platform CLI to manage them. There's a thousand Linux VMs to choose from here https://vmdepot.msopentech.com/List/Index
Yes, Linux is very well supported. After being accepted into Microsoft's BizSpark program this fall (excellent! Have a startup idea? Then apply!) I started using Azure just about exclusively and their Linux VM support is very nice.
I feel that Microsoft is on fairly even footing with AWS and Google Cloud.
Yup, you can get up and running with a Linux VM in seconds. I've found Azure to be cheaper than AWS for micro VM instances. Running a twitter bot on AWS cost me ~ $10/month but after switching over to a CentOS VM on Azure I'm paying about $6/month. I also have dedicated Ubuntu and Windows Server VMs for personal projects and hosting.
Another minor outage though, I think. They recently changed the permissions on /mnt, which contains the temp disk. Now various services that were using that for temp space fail to start. Easy enough to fix by chmod on start but still...
So Azure supports Linux VMs?! Microsoft does so little Azure advertising that I had to learn this fact from their RCA. Apparently they do support it since 2012: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/micro... but it is likely that many non-users of Azure do not know this.