MS is trying to push enterprises to move their datacenters to azure. To do this, they have to support a wide array of technologies such as java/memcached/ruby.
Windows Azure "machines" are just normal windows VMs. So you'd "administer" from unix however you'd administer a windows machine from unix. (?)
You can easily RDP into azure instances, so you could do that from linux if that's what your asking.
Or, if you're talking about managing your resources (e.g. spinning instances up and down) all of that stuff can be done via REST api. If there isn't a unix toolkit yet, there will be one. Tooling seems to lag feature development in Azure by a bit.
But then you have to go to the animal shelter. What about a startup that brings the shelter puppy to you for a fee, which is then split with the shelter? Win Win Win?
I'm getting off-point here, but did anyone else get annoyed that the MS blog post used bar charts when they should use pie charts to compare relative percentages?
It should be noted that many of the services that have been mentioned (heroku, dotcloud) are built on top of AWS, so they'll be no more reliable than AWS.
Other big players in the cloud space are MS Azure and Rackspace.
I just returned to linux after a ~7 year hiatus and have found it to be a night and day experience. My xp install had gotten so bad that I was forced to escape and decided to try ubuntu on a whim. I'm so glad I did because the OS is really snappy and I'm able to do everything I was doing on xp and I'm not subject to random crashes. The reason I think ubuntu is ready for the masses is because the install process, which is the first obstacle to adoption, is mindblowingly fast and smooth compared to what it was like 7 years ago when I was using debian 2.x. Two major pain points that are now fixed (at least for me):
-The wubi installer lets you effortlessly install a dual boot win xp / ubuntu machine in about 45 minutes. Previously I would have to use QParted or Acronis to carve a new partition and then run a linux installer, which for me wasn't that bad, but would be unseemly for a newbie. With wubi, you set everything up inside of winxp and it reboots your computer, installs the distro, and you instantly have linux on a dual boot. Anyone, no matter how little computer knowledge, can give ubuntu a try because of this.
- Driver support is much better than it was. It used to be a major pain to get important hardware such as wireless and video adapters working. When I installed this time, everything worked out of the box. This is huge for newbs.
After my latest ubuntu install, I'm going to try to fully transition my personal computer to linux. I'm also comfortable recommending it to those less computer savvy than me.