Microsoft’s weapon in high-stakes cloud-computing battle with Amazon? Freebies

Daniela Braga, founder of DefinedCrowd, and business-development manager Aya Zook opted to go with Microsoft's Azure over AWS. (Steve Ringman/The Seattle Times/TNS)

SEATTLE: DefinedCrowd, a Seattle software startup, had a choice to make when it was developing its first product last year: build on the cloud-computing foundation offered by the dominant Amazon, or Microsoft's upstart competitor? 

For founder Daniela Braga, the competing services seemed about even in terms of features. On price, Amazon's tools were a bit cheaper than Microsoft's. And more developers were comfortable working with Amazon Web Services, or AWS, the cloud-computing pioneer and now the market's largest player.