Azure Stack Reviews

Our primary use cases are computing, data platform along with migrating event-driven architecture. We use a lot of data bricks and data components. From the integration to data, and from the application deployment perspective to the platform as a service.

Azure Stack enhanced the productivity from the developers to testers to infrastructure engineers in the following way:

* Developers and the QA team focused on delivering business values rather than thinking about the build and deployment

* The infrastructure team focused more on automating the infra-build pipelines for different environments in no time 

* Azure Pipelines automated 80% of manual efforts on both the Development and Infra front. 

We have found the Kubernetes version is one of the key components which we are using heavily.

I would like to see the AI side come to one hundred percent in the near future. I would love to see a more reliable SAP improved.

I have been working with Azure Stack for the past seven years.

Azure Stack is highly stable across the globe from my experience.

Azure Stack is extremely scalable across the globe.

One of the best parts of technical support is they are really on top of all the issues. Once an incident has been raised, their team will call our technical engineers and start supporting them immediately. This is one of the major reasons why I have used Azure Stack. Azure Cloud is becoming so popular because in the end, businesses need assurance and they are always on top of it.

We were using an on-premise solution, but you know that an on-premise solution is not scalable with a cloud-based environment.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It is a lean, shallow learning curve. They can quickly grasp it and can start working on deployment. The deployment was pretty smooth because we set up the CI/CD pipeline and Azure pipeline, which automatically builds the solution. It does the unit test and performance test, and if everything goes well, it is scheduling the deployments for production quickly.

We have both in-house and third-party teams, depending on the requirements and complexity of the deployment.

The licensing is pay-as-you-go, and Azure also provides a bring-your-own-license. I believe that is a good option if anyone is looking at it and they already have a license. They can get the infrastructure and the provision in a very short time and it will save the existing licenses. 

Different applications will have different licensing needs. It depends on which tool you use. You will then need to secure that license.

We evaluated AWS and Google. It depends on the company and what the best fit is for the organization. If companies have similar requirements, they can follow us, or if they have a different requirement, I believe that Google or AWS might fit their needs as well.

I think that anybody who wants to move on to Azure Stack, needs to assess their requirements, and what business needs they have. I would rate Azure Stack an eight out of ten.

We're getting more serious with Office 365 now. We start from the mailbox, the mail server exchange, and then we also have SharePoint. We have migrated all the local network drives, shared drives, home drives, to Office 365 SharePoint. We have been making use of the document library for sharing, and this year, we've started to use more of Microsoft Teams as a kind of collaboration, for online meetings within the organization and also to communicate with our students. Microsoft Teams is not the only software that we use, we also use Zoom for class meetings, and then Microsoft Teams for team meetings, really.

As an education provider, we have many students — over a thousand students actually; they are also the users of this domain. We also have 250 permanent and casual staff, it's quite a big number.

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

At this stage, we are quite pleased with Office 365 Azure. To me, Azure offers a pathway for dealing with the active directory, and for storing all our Office 365 information assets.

Technical support is quick and responsive. I find that whenever I encounter an error (sometimes it's really the system errors or something that I didn't know how to do), the customer support is quite helpful. We get good support from Microsoft in terms of Office 365.

Take today, for example, we have a worldwide issue (maybe just Australia), and our Office 365 cloud authentication components were down for almost an hour. Thankfully, customer support helped us rectify that problem very quickly.

A consultant helped us with the implementation back in 2018.

I would only recommend this solution to smaller organizations like ours because I cannot really speculate what big issues that the bigger organizations will face. For a small or medium-sized college, it's quite good — I can't see any negative sides. In particular, our staff and students don't really use our computers. That means they are bringing their own devices and using their own computers. Because of Office 365, they don't need to come here (to campus) and they don't need to connect to any kind of VPN in order to access their emails or order their course materials or even the information that we provide on the internet, for that matter. Everything is on the cloud.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of ten — strictly because I have nothing to compare it to.

Our company is trying to build an application out of Azure Stack. We are trying to build an API out of Azure Stack, which will communicate with the ERP systems.

Azure Stack provides us with computational power. We also get an option to have it with Azure Cloud, which is beneficial. We don't need to buy any other extra servers or any virtual machines with high-end graphics. All the aforementioned details make it more convenient for me to work with Azure Stack.

The solution's price is high, and the implementation process is difficult. I would like to see a lower price and simpler implementation for Azure Stack.

I have been using Azure Stack for a year and a half. We also use the solution in our company. I am using the solution's latest version. 

My company is a reseller of Azure.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

Right now, it is not in the production stage as it is still under the development stage, because of which I can't give a number on how many people are using it currently.

We got technical support from Azure about thirty days ago, and they have been very good.

I rate the support team a nine out of ten.

Positive

The solution is deployed on Azure Cloud.

The deployment part was a bit difficult, but the document helped me to get it done. While configuring it, we faced issues with its network interfaces, along with some security issues and vulnerabilities.

It took me around 40 days to implement Azure Stack.

The implementation process was something that came along from the reseller from whom we bought the solution.

Three members consisting of an ML developer, a person from DevOps, and an architect, were required to do the deployment.

Azure Stack is not a very costly tool. The pricing is according to the services we buy. When compared with AWS, Azure is a bit more costlier.

There is a need to pay additionally for maintenance or support. If you need premium support, you have to pay extra.

Azure Stack is a good solution since it allows you to explore more things, especially on the ML or DevOps sides. I would recommend Azure Stack to anybody planning to use it.

My company has attempted to integrate Azure Stack with products from other vendors. We haven't faced any difficulties integrating Azure Stack with products from other vendors. We provide solutions with Azure platform.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight and a half out of ten.

We use Azure Stack primarily for hosting customer applications .NET applications. We use mainly App Service, Blob Storage, and Cognitive Services. 

We develop applications on the Microsoft platform, infrastructure, and servers. Our servers are Windows, and we use the .NET framework and C# programming language. Everything is easier in Azure.

Azure Stack integrates well with Microsoft. It's also good for transitioning from an on-premise or hybrid setup to the cloud. It's seamless. 

Microsoft is changing the Azure Stack interface all the time, so it's sometimes hard to find the functionality or the service you're looking for. A feature was in one place and now it has moved somewhere else. 

It's because the product is quickly evolving, so they're changing constantly. I understand, but it's difficult to find things when we don't use Azure every day. It's not a big issue.

We've been using Azure Stack for seven or eight years.

Azure Stack is highly stable.

We have had a good experience with scalability. Azure Stack's replication is well-written. It's flexible. For example, you can scale it differently on workdays and weekends to reduce operating costs. We automatically reduce the sizing of the solution. We stop some services like VMs on the weekends if we can. Scaling up and stopping resources is automated based on a set schedule. This is useful.

Microsoft support is very good.

We switched from AWS to Azure. The main issues were costs and some bad experiences with temporary disks. This was a long time ago, so I cannot say if AWS is currently better or worse than Azure.

Azure Stack is also in the cloud, so it's easy. We also use the Internet Information Server. If you use the node server, it's going to be local and based on the technology you're using. We can choose between one or the other.

For example, we use Mongo Atlas service on Azure and on-premises. Both use the MongoDB Atlas service. It is architecture bound, so you have the choice of going through Azure or the on-premise solution because both have advantages.

Azure is relatively expensive, but on the other hand, you get excellent support, stability, and security, so I think it's worth it. 

I rate Azure Stack nine out of 10. It is a great tool if the technology you use is a Microsoft-based stack because Azure is Microsoft's cloud provider. 

Not sure

move to cloud - improved by no need to maintain hardware

We've had a lot of issues with the solution as of late. We aren't very happy with it right now.

The stability is okay.

You can scale the solution if you need to.

We started to get issues in May of this year.  We didn't know that the one side of Azure was not fully migrated. There's two Azure on-premise solutions in our organization.

I needed to migrate everything that wasn't migrated over quickly. I needed someone who was knowledgable to assist to get it done. Therefore, I asked Windows and was looking into our budget.

We told them to go ahead and do it, and that we had two thus far, one for memory, one for CPU, and that's all. I only wanted two point areas. I wanted my Azure to point to only one, however, now it's set up to point to two point areas, which is not what we want.

The solution is not user friendly. I'd prefer to move over to AWS, which is much easier in this sense.

The product could improve its manageability.

I've been using the solution for a while, however, we started having issues with the solution in May of 2020.

The stability is okay, however, there are a few glitches here and there. 

The scalability is okay. However, AWS is easier to scale. With AWS, you don't have to update your CPU and RAM. Everything's done for you.

In terms of technical support, it's very bad. We don't have a guy who is good at helping us, in our company, so we have to rely on the Shanghai team. The one person who supports us is in Shanghai.

We are relying on Shanghai technical support to help to create dashboards or whatever we need. Moving forward, we need a good technical guy in-house to help us. I cannot rely on Shanghai every time. 

Shanghai also seems to have two teams, however, I don't understand why. There's no direct number to the right people you have to reach, and the customer team we find to be quite bad. We're not overly satisfied with the level of service we've been provided so far.

The initial setup wasn't as easy as AWS, which has a much simpler deployment.

We ran into issues in terms of migration. Not everything was fully migrated, originally, and that caused us a lot of problems. It's still not quite set up how I would like it to be.

I've looked into AWS, which is more user friendly, and is a solution I would prefer to move over to. Not only is it always easier for us too manage by another provision, it's a lot faster. Azure is slower. 

Honestly, if I were to compare the two, I'd say that AWS is much better. It's so much easier to deal with and easier to understand. It's also easier to deploy and has a shorter learning curve overall. On top of that, AWS provides 20% of the traffic to the site. You don't need to update your processor for CPU and RAM. They do all of that for free. There's just way more up-sides to AWS than Azure, unfortunately.

Azure is just average. I'd rate it five out of ten. As an end-user, I find it far too difficult to manage, and it's not really worth the effort, especially when there are other solutions that make it so much easier.

We have an application that is working on Azure Stack. It is a Microsoft application that we wrote for our customers. 

Azure Stack is easy to use. Its major benefit is that it doesn't need its infrastructure. We didn't face any issues integrating it with our infrastructure. 

The product needs to improve its pricing. 

Azure Stack is stable and I rate it an eight out of ten. 

The tool is scalable. We have one customer working with it. 

The solution's customer service is fine. 

Depending on your setup, the tool's deployment can be complex and take a few hours to complete. I need to select the services and resources to deploy the tool. Though I have a team, only one engineer works on the product. 

I am using my Microsoft license, and it costs monthly. You need to pay additional costs apart from the standard costs. 

We are in the process of obtaining co-pilots to integrate AI into our infrastructure. I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten. 

Our company's customers consume the products installed from Azure Stack, so that is the usage of Azure Stack for our company. Speaking about Azure Stack from a financial perspective, if I have to talk about ERR, it is approximately 4,000 USD per month.

The most valuable features of the solution are related to anything and everything in data and analytics, including data management and Azure ML.

I think the monitoring and operational part, including more administration, must be simplified to simplify user adoption. The challenge in Azure Stack begins at an individual level when you try to monitor every service from Azure Stack that gets consumed. The more the configuration capacity is available in Azure Stack, the more configurable it becomes while becoming easier at a user level and administrator level, thereby helping to optimize the consumption cost.

With the road map of Azure Stack, I have, everything looks great. Looking at the way Azure Stack has matured in the market, I feel that the roadmap of Azure Stack is planned pretty well by Azure's product managers.

I have experience with Azure Stack for three to four years.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Considering the administration part and scope for improvement, I rate the solution's scalability an eight out of ten since it needs improvement at a user level and administration level regarding its consumption. The administrator does have all the rights, but then there should be some level of configuration needed if you go at an application level or at a service level where a user is using native capabilities of Azure should have an option for the administrator to extend it to the end user also.

There are around 15 users of Azure Stack in my company.

I do contact the solution's technical support when the need for it arises. The solution's technical support is great since, in our company, we get answers to most of our questions, and most of our queries get resolved with the help of the documentation itself. At least at our company's end, based on the services we are working on, we are less likely to depend on the solution's technical support.

The initial setup of Azure Stack is simple.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

Azure Stack is a medium-priced product, so it is not overpriced, but the prices may be higher for certain services.

Based on the secondary data or information we got in our company based on the initial evaluation we did, I think the way the instances are spread and made available across the globe makes Azure Stack a relatively easier product compared to its competitors. Azure Stack becomes easier to adopt with the new GDPR and the country-level data privacy or security rules implemented.

I recommend Azure Stack to those planning to use it. Most of our company's customers who use Azure Stack are happy.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

We are looking to implement asset management of marks and enrollment.

The product is fine. It comes with everything. It is probably the best solution out there.

Certain elements are difficult to deploy.

My organization has been using the solution for a number of years.

The deployment is probably not easy. Certain elements are easy to deploy, but certain elements aren’t. The ease of deployment depends on the maturity of the technical teams. If they're quite mature and experienced, then it's not too much of an issue. If there is a knowledge or skill gap, then, obviously, it'll be quite an issue. However, if it is a large organization, engaging with Microsoft is probably fine since it can fill in all the gaps for the organization.

We have a dedicated Microsoft team always working within our organization.

The product is expensive, but it is fine for the value that the solution produces.

I work for the government in a department related to leasing infrastructure. We are using the latest version of the product. Intune has recently opened a lot of functionality very similar to Jamf. There's quite a big gap between what Jamf offers and what Intune offers.

People planning to use the product should engage with Microsoft quite early on and see what products would benefit them rather than trying to figure it out themselves. It would be good if Intune would offer features aligning with enrollment and asset discovery. Jamf provides these features.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.