The past few days have been very busy... IOHK has spooled up the Shelley Testnet, then a Mainnet Candidate, then a Shelly Testnet 2. Each of those "genesis" chains requires complete rebuilding of wallets and stake pools. There have been many up until 1 or 2 AM nights learning the nuts and bolts necessary to successfully host a stake pool.
We've been there the whole time, creating and re-creating our stake pool nodes, obtaining test ADA (usually through polite, broad "please send me some tADA" comments) and minting blocks. We've been very engaged and involved in the Cardano stake pool operator community, watching as things unfolded, and provided some tips and a walkthrough of creation for other pool operators. In short... we're getting our feet wet and learning the ropes.
Throughout this endeavor, our Azure-based Linux virtual machines have been rock-solid and dependable, as guaranteed by Microsoft and we are very pleased. As an FYI, although Amazon Web Services is the largest public cloud, Microsoft has the most security certifications, feature set, and largest global distribution (>150 data centers globally).
We will continue to stay involved, with the plan being to be there on day one when Cardano mainnet is launched.
