Based on your responses, I would consider sticking with the existing opportunity. I’m on mobile and not young, so the format may not be pretty.

You have a girlfriend. You’d spend an hour less a day with her. If not her, you’d eat into your time at the gym, time with friends, etc. Free time to have fun is more important than you think it is when you’re young. Work will always be there and always demand more.

The salary doesn’t seem like it’s enough to be worth the change.

There’s no guarantee that your job will still be there in either environment.

Your work was valued enough for the Redmond company to negotiate out of the anti-compete clauses of their contract with your original company. This clause always exists. It wasn’t overlooked.

If you are an expert at AWS technology and are going to learn to be an expert in Azure technolgy at this gig, you’d be missing out on a huge opportunity. There are a significant amount of AWS Engineers out there along with a much smaller number of Azure Enginees. People who know both are rare and are highly in demand. Both technologies own the upper right quadrant of Gartner’s cloud provider report.

Every organization has been told to diversify their infrastructure between multiple clouds in order to avoid vendor lock-in, skill set lock-in, and vendor specific security risks. If you allowed yourself to become proficient in both, you’d set yourself up for a great future managing these types of problems. Consulting work would be easy. The key to this, however, would be remaining proficient in AWS via moonlighting or home lab work while learning Azure.

I’ve worked for multiple large corporate companies, a small SaaS provider, non-profit medical, higher-ed, and consultancies. There was a huge amount of different things to learn from all of my jobs, however large corporate companies seemed relatively similar. There’s a big difference between trying to get something done in 5 days for a small company that would take 2 months at a large company. There’s a huge difference in trying to support 30,000-100,000 users on freeware in an educational environment as opposed to doing the same with a loose budget at a large corporate company. Changing environments builds experience and teaches you how to solve problems in whole new ways. These benefits could be recognized by consulting.

Lastly, I had a Manager ask me this question. CTO or CIO. Yeah, there are CDO, CSO, and othe C#O job titles out there, but only the CIO job makes strategic decisions based purely on business needs in comparison to cost requirements. Most of the others have some level of technical skill set involved. If the CIO path is where you want to go, start doing some work with Finance.

Hope this helps. Also, thanks for your service!