Ask HN: Why do you use Azure?

I recently changed jobs, and new employer is heavily invested in using Azure and is using everything they can from Azure. If I had to say why it seems it is maybe because Azure had some free credit with visual studio licenses that my employer already pays for everyone, but this credit is mostly not used. It may be that the industry I work in is a bit more windows heavy also.

In general though I find Azure quite horrible to work with. One of the things we use from azure is azure DevOps - which is one of the most unfortunate things I have seen in some time. Gitlab's free offering is vastly superior and I don't think you will have to go far to find something that is a substantially better choice than Azure DevOps.

In general Azure seems to be quite rickety, with VMs sometimes taking more than 10 minutes to delete. The consideration for linux is also severely wanting when it comes to their tooling.

I have worked with AWS and GCP, both are significantly less painful to work with. I don't get why Azure is even a player in the market with how sub par their offering is.