According to Wikipedia:
"Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service and supports many different programming languages, tools and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems."
Azure obviously provides all the benefits of cloud, but it is also an open and flexible cloud. Azure cloud supports a variety of operating systems, languages, tools, platforms, utilities, and frameworks. It supports both Linux and Windows, SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres and more, C#, Python, Java, ...
