Re: Peak?
If you're setting something up outside of Azure so that 32 users can log in at any time of any day without significant delays (which is what the equivalent MS offering would permit) you'd need 32 VMs running 24/7/365.
There is no technical reason for this whatsoever - it's purely Microsoft's discriminatory/predatory/protectionist scumbag licensing terms.
Of course you can start to do clever automated demand prediction and management to try to scale stuff and work around it on non-Azure deployments, but the fundamental point is that you shouldn't bloody well have to.
I'm hoping that Microsoft genuinely get taken to the cleaners over this. Their pathetic licensing restrictions stopped us 10+ years ago from offering a highly specialised SaaS VDI hosted on our own tin, because it destroyed any economy of scale across multiple customers.
Instead we had to deploy Windows PCs everywhere, so MS only got the revenue for those OEM licenses, instead of probably 10x more revenue for ongoing VDI licensed subscriptions.
The expense that stopped our project from going anywhere perversely wasn't the Microsoft licensing costs, but was the fact that their licenses stipulated that we couldn't share physical servers or SANs across multiple customers. Having to commission new servers and SANs for every single customer, with associated VMware licensing, lead time, and implementation effort destroyed any economic benefit SaaS VDI could have offered.
Microsoft behaves in a horribly protectionist manner and abuses its position to stifle innovation. They've got everyone by the short-and-curlies, and they don't even have to try to be good any more, as evidenced by the generally terrible quality control of products they release these days.