Excellent article.
I would suggest a single caveat that having a secondary copy of the data somewhere other than Azure is a good practice if this is business critical data. It's a very minor point in what is an excellent article. Nice work.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning