Thought this was kind of cool, and worth sharing here:
You can now use a Gallery Image to deploy a Minecraft server on Azure!
"This gallery package will set up a preconfigured Minecraft server running on Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS. You can connect to it using the DNS name (e.g. name.cloudapp.net) of the virtual machine on port 25565"
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/partners/microsoft/minecraftserver/