> Azure subscription and it's not a perfect UX; but man does it beat AWS

I actually disagree with this pretty strongly. The Azure UI seems flashy for the sake of being flashy. The AWS UI is much easier to navigate and use for me.

Azure's UI is more unified though. There are some random AWS services (e.g. sqs) that have a totally different UI theme going on.

Edit: the Azure UI is only more unified if you ignore the fact that there are two totally separate versions (classic + the new portal), and you end up having to hop between the two in some instances if you have some older infrastructure because feature parity is not perfect.

The way I read parent's comment is: "Azure's UI is not as good as AWS, but the instance is better". I may be wrong but I think parent meant that you get more resources for the money.

But does AWS have anything like bizspark that's open to everyone? If not, it is not a fair fight.

looks like you are right. I think I just misread the parent comment.

I read it similarly to you

I have to +1 this. Not only is it easier to navigate, AWS always manages to run pretty smoothly, while Azure's website makes my 2014 Macbook Pro slow to a crawl. It often takes up to a second for a CSS :hover effect to appear!

I agree, what Microsoft shows us today is a real evolution of a software-engineering empire done (mostly) right. The sad fact is that this open-source love + tons of goodies for developers comes after decades of pain and suffering, which were not really "killing" Microsoft, but they were risking a lot. Now they're flying, leaving Apple far behind (Apple completely lacks a multi-tier engineering vision), but if they get a monopoly again... pain and suffering will be back. That's the free market.

What is a "multi-tier" engineering vision?

Outside US, in regards to development tooling and selling applications to business, Apple never meant much.

> Also, I have a bizspark Azure subscription and it's not a perfect UX; but man does it beat AWS

How so?

I am not a super user of AWS and have light demands as far as the console. I find the documentation and dashboard pretty decent; burnrate monitor and basic services(vm, ip, storage) easy enough. The naming and requirements-- and also the split up of resources v. Classic is pretty annoying.

On AWS I was through a sea of services I don't need w/ poor docs, clunky configs and a lot of security tiers. Their pricing is baffling and I really just think it looks terrible. Azure has similar issues; but I can navigate it better and feel more comfortable w) it

Thanks for your input on this. I'm considering getting my AWS Developer certificate so I'm glad to have some warning about it going in..

Again; this is my own opinion and I am not on a competitive dev team. AWS is the defacto standard; and I think learning the API keeps you out of the UI.

Azure has one too; they are both clunky and more than I need but; and someone who uses AWS hopefully will chime in-- my guess is most people use the API almost exclusively. I don't have enough familiarity to judge it; have only use it a bit and a while ago

Whenever I tried to use Azure, it was soooo slow. Is it better now?

The dashboard is still very slow.

But all in all, the technical offering is pretty good and easy to be productive in.