I would disagree with this. Many of the cloud platforms are the same but Azure is not. Microsoft Azure is just a horrible cloud platform and I'm not quite sure why any qualified and competent IT person would select this platform over all of the other options available. I suspect this comes down as a mandate from someone in senior leadership who does not know how to evaluate these things.

Microsoft's view of disk attached to a machine is literally the dos equivalent of disk handling. They want you to have a OS drive and a data drive. That just shows how archaic windows is in management of its disk. The use of a logical volume manager seems to be a foreign concept and that disk should be just something abstracted away that the operating system isn't really thinking about. This is how it is on literally every other major cloud platform but in Azure you need to think about your systems as if they're running MS-DOS.

One other thing I've noted with Microsoft as your which does not happen in other cloud platforms is the UUIDs of the disks change from what's presented to the BIOS/EFI to what the actual operating system sees. That's quite strange additionally I've noted that Hyper-V does this as well. I have noticed this phenomenon on other virtualization platforms. So what exactly is Microsoft intercepting here and can you trust any level of encryption that you have to actually be secure.

Next Azure had to be dragged kicking and screaming to use the generic cloud init as opposed to their own unique agent. Even now that they support it it's still a second class citizen compared to every other major cloud provider. With the preference of using Microsoft's own agent that attempts to root your system in a very strange way and literally can brick systems because it doesn't understand what it's doing. It follows no Linux best practices for management of systems and runs a bunch of horrible shell scripts that just face roll your system.

Microsoft Azure seems to be Microsoft's answer to trying to steal back market share and lock you into a vendor at the same time. Other cloud providers don't seem to be trying to force you down a vendor lock-in path. Just publishing an image to the Azure marketplace is a stressful headache of nonsense with obscure checks that don't seem to provide any value. You had Microsoft claims this is for the integrity of their marketplace blah blah blah but can't actually explain what or why their checks are done nor can they explain the industry best practices that they are requiring and why.

So no they are not the same Microsoft is doing more of the same that Microsoft does trying to exclude competition and lock people in to the Microsoft way of doing things. I encourage people to take a closer look at many of the agents that Microsoft likes to install on your systems in Azure for management. Note how they installed these things on your system and they run as a non-root user, which is a good idea, they install sudoer's files so they can elevate their permissions when they need to, which is another good idea but they must have had a junior person who literally knows nothing write these things because the files that they're executing was sudo are owned by the same user their agent runs as. So any compromise someone can literally overwrite these files and have complete ownership of your system. This is Microsoft security for you. This is a complete and utter joke. But go ahead Tell me how they're all the same because I don't see this kind of nonsense in other cloud platform providers.