Azure is great if you stick to the three golden oldies: DTU-based SQL, app service and service bus. Maybe table storage if you're feeling lucky. Anything else leads to pain and $$$, because it's likely that no one at Microsoft is being forced to use it.
Not in my experience. Running just under 100 VMs, they'd randomly fail and restart about once a year. One month, something went terribly wrong with our k8s cluster and nodes were becoming unhealthy and being replaced every few hours to the tune of 500 replacements in a month for a 60 node cluster.
Premium SSD v2 is fairly good released generally about a year ago. Premium SSD was pretty painfully slow.
