"We could never ever put our customers at risk"
Bold words. Especially when, just a few paragraphs later, it is said that no, Azure does not turn off hyperthreading. You can talk mitigations 'till the pigeons come home to roost, you're putting your clients at risk.
That being said, and my having already stated that I cannot, for the life of me, turn off hyperthreading, I'm wondering just exactly how much of a risk it really is. Is an Azure server always a Windows platform ? If it is Linux, that's already a lot of malware that is ineffective. Is there an actual exploit in the wild, being used at this time ?
I'm not saying that the side-channel attack is a figment of imagination, I'm just wondering how easy it is to actually implement and get data out of from a hacker's point of view.