I've been quite impressed by AWS uptime. I've been looking at Azure - I am cautiously bullish. I'd like to take their services out for a genuine ride, but don't have the time to really invest deeply into exercising them.
They give you $150 credit each month for 3 years upon signing up with bizspark with nothing to pay up front. Surely that justifies taking the time to check it out if you're already curious.
$150/month can't even come close to paying me back for the downtime experienced using Azure. Plus their online console is one of the most useless interfaces I've used.
I am a BizSpark member, and my blog: http://www.devfactor.net is hosted there. I CAN say that when I got ~500k page-views in the last week of December Azure held up fine.
In terms of performance, it is pretty good for the price (free).
My only issue has been the down-time, Its actually been down more than my previous Linux host. I hope MS can figure out how to keep it online a bit more often :)
The time I would spend would be the time writing management code, putting the APIs through their paces, really finding the limits (I do that in some areas of AWS today). Unfortunately, I'd have to be doing that at my day job to really invest the quality time.
I will probably shake out an account and see what it's like for a cookie cutter user. I'm sure the experience is vastly different for a power user.
