> all cloud providers have an exorbitant premium when it comes to running Windows on their VMs
Speaking from first hand running-a-cloud-platform experience, it's because running Windows on a cloud platform is not easy, and comes with licensing costs that have to be paid to Microsoft for each running instance (plus a bunch of infrastructure to support it). It's not even a per-instance-per-time-interval cost, there's all sorts of stuff wrapped up in it and impact the effective cost. It requires a bunch of administrative work and specific coding to try to optimise the costs to the cloud provider.
In addition, where Linux will happily transfer between different hardware configurations, you'll often have to have separate Windows images for each hardware configuration, so that means even more overhead on staffing both producing and supporting. So e.g. SR-IOV images, PV images, bare metal images (for each flavour of bare metal hardware), etc. While a bunch of this work can be fully automated, it's still not a trivial task, and producing that first image for a new hardware configuration can take a whole bunch of work, even where you'd think it would be trivial.
Speaking from first hand running-a-cloud-platform experience, it's because running Windows on a cloud platform is not easy, and comes with licensing costs that have to be paid to Microsoft for each running instance (plus a bunch of infrastructure to support it). It's not even a per-instance-per-time-interval cost, there's all sorts of stuff wrapped up in it and impact the effective cost. It requires a bunch of administrative work and specific coding to try to optimise the costs to the cloud provider.
In addition, where Linux will happily transfer between different hardware configurations, you'll often have to have separate Windows images for each hardware configuration, so that means even more overhead on staffing both producing and supporting. So e.g. SR-IOV images, PV images, bare metal images (for each flavour of bare metal hardware), etc. While a bunch of this work can be fully automated, it's still not a trivial task, and producing that first image for a new hardware configuration can take a whole bunch of work, even where you'd think it would be trivial.