In my very limited experience Azure is much, much nicer than AWS from the admin experience. Its kind of embarrassing for Amazon how bad AWS is in that area. Google CE also has very nice UI.
I understand that Azure is competitive on price, and they do support all of the linuxy things you'd expect from AWS or GCE.
Unfortunately all that comes at the expense of reliability from what I've seen. :/
Ya right, so you are selling me a cloud service by the GUI. I don't use the GUI on any of my providers, so it doesn't really matter. (It might matter to the same subset of people that use remote desktop to "administer" their fleet of window servers)
Like I said, I cannot imaginable that many non .net shops would touch azure. It has neither the features of AWS, nor the magic of GCE.
That's an unusual experience. The Azure API is _horrible_ throughout (the AWS one is more variable, but the common parts are fine). The Azure portal may be pretty, but that is at the expense of being actually usable or useful.
Oh my god, no. The Azure Portal is absolutely the worst part of the Azure experience, by a long, long stretch. I don't know anyone who uses it regularly who likes it.
I understand that Azure is competitive on price, and they do support all of the linuxy things you'd expect from AWS or GCE.
Unfortunately all that comes at the expense of reliability from what I've seen. :/