Microsoft Azure Reviews

We are vendors. We are neutral from the technologies. We provide solutions to our clients as well as implement the customer needs with the different technologies.

We have a multi-channel mobile app solution that we implement, and we have an API deployed on Azure cloud. We use API management in the Azure cloud.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the ease of use.

The Azure APIs is monetization. Its support, monetization for prepaid and postpaid are good features that we look for.

I would like to see this solution support integration.

We have been selling Microsoft Azure for a couple of years.

We are implementing the latest version.

Microsoft Azure is stable.

It's a scalable solution. We have approximately 1,000 users who are using this solution.

Technical support is awesome! It's very good.

We have installed many competitive products, such as Appigee and IBM, but Microsoft Azure is the easiest one to install.

While I was not a part of the deployment, I know it took them less than a week.

We have a team of 10 to 15 for the deployment, customization, and implementation of this solution.

For anyone who is interested in using this solution, I would recommend it.

I would rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten.

We use it to extend our own data centers and banking scenarios for banking solutions.

It provides us with access to technology that's not available in any other form. It only exists in the cloud. In order to keep our solutions modern, we have to do it through the public cloud.

Kubernetes service and API management are the most valuable.

It should have a better hybrid-cloud central analysis. Their support service also needs to be improved. Our main concern is support calls. Our issue is basically related to the technical functionality of the services that we use. It doesn't behave as expected, and support often fails to solve the problem.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is pretty stable. It has very good stability.

It is scalable. There are no issues with scalability.

We have a maximum of 200 users. They include internal developers and other types of profiles.

Their support service needs to be improved.

It is complex because the solutions are complex. It depends on how you want to do the setup. For our business scenario, it is complex because there are a lot of security rules that are involved in it.

It is competitive with other public cloud providers, and its price is very close to different cloud providers. There is not a noticeable difference between different cloud providers. Otherwise, it would be a risk for them to have services that were much more expensive than their competition. They're pretty much neck to neck on pricing.

I would advise others to go for the closest possible platform as a service. Do not go for infrastructure as a service; go for platform as a service.

I would rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten.

Currently we are hosting custom web applications, boxed applications, Azure VMs, Azure files for shared company files, Azure blob storage, Azure Active Directory with Active Directory sync, Single Sign On, and development and testing purposes.

Creating VMs for development has been huge since we ran out of resources locally. Creating Hybrid solutions provides us with greater confidence in higher availability. Storage has made remote access to files much more painless and easy. Using SSO has also been great reducing the number of passwords and locations required to use them.

Customized Dashboard, Site-to-site and point-to-Site VPN, Virtual Machines, Web Apps, SQL, SharePoint, Storage, Test/Dev environments.

Pricing is very difficult to guesstimate. With so many a la carte options and individual pricing it can be a hassle to understand. I constantly need to go over the report to find out where I can save money and what is eating up the monthly costs.

No issues with stability. Has been rock solid.

Scalability is Microsofts big advantage. At anytime you can scale up or down your servers or services growing them or shrinking them to your needs. You can even automate this process. I personally do not get into Enterprise solutions but they continue to add larger solutions frequently.  

Customer Service:

First response is 2-4 hours. Staff is knowledgeable but can often be difficult to understand and slow. Although I do not call about routine issues and bring very complex problems there way. With that said I will say every issue does get resolved.

Technical Support:

I rate technical support 7/10. First response is 2-4 hours. Staff is knowledgeable but can often be difficult to understand. I have also found that a few of them try to e-mail you despite your request for a call. This causes much miscommunication and additional time your problem is not getting resolved.

I only give them an 7 because I have struggled a time or two with understanding their English or getting the ball rolling resolving my issue. This all really depends on the department you need.

I will say that they always get the issue resolved regardless of the complexity of the problem.

No I have not, but we chose Azure simply simply because we are Microsoft partners and get free Azure credits to work with.  Microsoft is also a power player in cloud solution and a trusted name.  

Huge learning curve for me. I found just diving in was incredibly difficult. Much lab time required to understand how things work together. Once you get going however it all makes sense.

I also find the GUI to be more intuitive then AWS and feels better.

They are constantly changing the GUI while they continue migrating the ASM model to the ARM model. Since this is a living platform it can change from one day to the next adding features. 

I implemented all the solutions myself with a little research.

Microsoft does have special pricing for Development purposes. This does help reduce the monthly costs for our team.

As our local resources reach their end of life, we have moved servers and services to Azure.  It becomes more of an operation expense as apposed to a capitol expense. 

We are MS partners. Depending on your partnership you may or may not get Visual Studio Enterprises licenses. Each license allows you to get a $150 Azure credit per month.

This has been great for our developers and I to put in to practice some Azure solutions.

There are many other free credits available as well.  Do some searching.

If you need to purchase Azure they do have a pricing calculator that may help you determine costs.  https://azure.microsoft.com/en...

I know AWS is another great solution, but have not tackled it yet. I do have plans to experiment with Amazons solution to determine for my own the differences. 

The biggest advantage to using Azure over any other cloud solution is the ability to move your domain into the cloud and be completely server free and still have domain services.

I have also found that site-to-site vpn with domain services rack up a good percentage of our monthly costs. These are the fundamentals to move your network into Azure.

The advantage of Microsoft Azure is its simplicity. It's easy to launch a project. However, the problem with this kind of solution is the reliability for the customers. You have to be sure to stay with Microsoft.

It's not always simple to manage the team who use it. Sometimes customers abuse the capacity and it's not always easy to bill the department for the usage.

Microsoft Azure is not always a user-friendly solution. There are too many people who develop this solution. For the end-users, sometimes it's not really fun to use or simple to use. It could be improved.

It's difficult to stop the solution when you have started, you need to use it for the long term. You have to make a good choice when you start the project with Microsoft or with Amazon too. You will have the same problem, once you choose one you have to commit.

When a feature doesn't exist in Microsoft Azure, generally we can use other software that does the job very well, such as backups or supervision. Any products to help the customers and engineers to do a good job, such as managing large infrastructure. There is a lot of solution to make it work well.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for approximately three years.

The stability of the solution was good we have not had a problem.

The scalability is good, there are nearly no limits, and simple to do. However, it is difficult to see the limit.

My engineers sometimes have used the support, I don't have any feedback about troubles with the support. I think the support is good. I don't have bad feedback.

The deployment of the solution is quick and easy.

My advice to others is to be sure if they choose the cloud it is the right choice for them. A customer can be in a hybrid solution, or cloud, or on-premise solution. I prefer the hybrid solution, in the same project. It's a choice they need to make for the long term.

I rate Microsoft Azure an eight out of ten.

The use case for Azure is maintenance. Azure maintains the infrastructure so we don't have to, and that's the best use case for any cloud-based application.

Azure is very flexible.

Any time you use a cloud service, there are increased security risks. If you want more security, you have to have private hosting.

I've been using Azure for about five or six years.

In general, I think Microsoft support is strong.

Azure could be cheaper. Of course, if you ask anyone, they'll always say it could be cheaper. We are paying monthly.

I rate Azure nine out of 10. I would recommend it to others.

We have a complete Microsoft ecosystem. Azure comes with a variety of parts such as infrastructure as a service and platform as a service or SaaS. We are using it for infrastructure as a service and software as a service as well, so both SaaS and IaaS are being used.

All of our solutions are being deployed on the Azure server. We use the Azure authentication functionality across our organization, which is a single sign-on functionality, so it is Azure-based. We also are incorporating the DevOps framework, which, again, is being integrated to Azure. Our complete backbone is being moved to Azure, and most of our systems are moving to the cloud version.

I think the single sign-on functionality and the ease with which you can deposit things on the cloud have been valuable.

Azure has very robust security functionalities and authentication features, which come with mobility, along with backup and credential checks.

Scalability is also very robust because you can deploy the solutions on the go, and along with that, it provides you an ecosystem to integrate with the existing Microsoft products. For example, we have Power BI, and it's very nicely integrated with the Azure cloud version.

The interface is quite user friendly and intuitive. The reporting is perfect as well.

Integration with other services could be much better.

We have been using Microsoft Azure for over two years now.

The stability is very good. As it is a Microsoft product, the reliability is very good.

Because it's a cloud-based solution, scalability is not an issue at all. We currently have over 200 development team members using Microsoft Azure.

Technical support staff have been responsive, and the support was good.

The initial setup was a bit complex. It was getting ruled out sometimes, but it was at a Pan-India level. So, it was expected to take some time; it took about 8 to 12 months. Overall, it was good.

I believe that we have a three-year license, and I'm happy with the pricing.

I think Azure works best when you have the complete Microsoft ecosystem. Then, you get the real value out of it. In my firm, we have the complete enterprise licensing model. So, we have an integrated ecosystem, which provides a very collaborative way of working, along with the ease of creating.

If I were to rate Microsoft Azure on a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at nine.

Our use cases are basically cost agility and efficiency.

Microsoft Azure really enforces the automation capabilities of our workforce. It drives us towards a new operating model in terms of delivering services more quickly and more automatically.

I think Azure's level of automation to achieve efficiency or agility is valuable. I also like the change capability cadence, the showback capabilities, and understanding what our costs are. We don't have that in our on-premise environment. That whole showback capability is very interesting for us. It helps to hold the stakeholders accountable for our spending. 

Talking about improvement is like a double-edged sword. We like that they have the new capabilities, but sometimes they're deprecating capabilities faster than we can handle. If we had to improve it, we would want to stay on some of these older capabilities a bit longer. It's a brilliant platform for our staff to be more agile and more efficient but probably doesn't match with us in terms of maturity.

For example, they offer this tagging capability, but they keep introducing new platforms without it. We've become heavily reliant on tagging, but in the case of NetApp, they introduced it into the environment, and now we're not able to get the showback off of that. 

If they introduce new capabilities, they have to have all the features and functions on that new capability. They're not very good at that. If they introduce new capabilities, all the feature sets on these new capabilities should be available immediately. From my perspective, that's where they need to improve.

We have been using Microsoft Azure for about a year.

Stability is very good.

Microsoft Azure is very scalable. Our data center staff are using the solution, and then the application teams are engaging the data center staff to use that solution. We've just had a few use cases in there, and now we're just gaining experience.

Like with any new technology, we're currently re-skilling staff. It's the way we're approaching it on a six to 12-month journey before we start to get to the product and the benefits.

Technical support is average.

The initial setup isn't straightforward. You need to bring in an experienced system integrator to help you with the knowledge transfer. That's the approach we took.

We brought in an experienced system integrator that helped us build the environment and did the knowledge transfer into our workforce. I think that's a requirement. We had a very positive experience with our system integrator. The setup, we call it the Azure landing zone, and it's the data center. To set up the foundational build was a three-month engagement.

The system integrator is the intermediary between Microsoft and us. That's the value proposition of a system integrator. The system integrator helps cut through some of that. Microsoft is a big organization, and it's sometimes very hard to get to the right resources with the right knowledge. The challenge with Microsoft is that they have multiple solutions, and it's up to you to pick the right solution path. That's very hard for most organizations to do.

It's a metered environment, and it's pay-as-you-go. That's the big challenge with a metered environment. The challenge is optimizing how you use that to reduce your meter costs. It's like your children have to be good at not leaving the lights on in their bedroom to save on the power bill. That's a cultural change. 

You have to change your consumption patterns, and that's hard to do. You can get a very big bill because your consumption patterns aren't very good. We're no different than any other organization that's gone to a public cloud. You get these surprise bills, and then you've got to figure out how to manage them down appropriately.

For us, the additional cost is connectivity to the Azure data center. They said that we had to set up an Equinix data center to get from our location here in Regina, Saskatchewan, to Toronto down East. Those are some big new communication charges that we didn't have before.

That adds a significant cost to that. Private internet connectivity to a cloud is a big expense. That can be a very big cost, especially for remote businesses that are co-located to cloud data centers.

Microsoft Azure was a strategic choice. We wanted to go with a multi-cloud model, but we felt like we didn't know enough about clouds. We just kind of thought Microsoft was one of our strategic partners and decided to go with them and learn before we took the multi-cloud approach.

The advice I would give potential users would be to focus on their cost management skills and metering skills. It's all about managing your consumption. You've got to understand your consumption patterns and then learn how to manage consumption patterns going forward.

It's a really good product. In terms of leading hyperscalers, they offer very competitive features, functions, and rates compared to AWS and Google. They continue to advance their technical capabilities as rapidly or more rapidly than the other two hyperscalers. So, I would rate Microsoft Azure very high.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Microsoft Azure a nine.

• IoT with C# and .NET Core 2.1. 
• Raspberry Pi with Raspbian OS.
• Docker containers
• For use in security applications in the retail sector
• Using RabbitMQ for message queueing between the internet of things and the cloud.

I compare it to AWS that I used prior to this. I find it much more intuitive, more visual, more obvious where things are and how to change their configurations, etc.  

• Being able to set up, change and configure VMs is easy - a lot easier than in AWS
• Feedback and error messages make much more sense in Azure than in AWS.

I get the impression there are a number of services offered by AWS that are not yet available on Azure, but it seems to be catching up pretty fast.

It seems to me that Azure is a little less stable than AWS but not so that it makes a difference, given how much time you save doing other stuff like configuring, etc.

Very easy to scale in and out but has unpredictable costing as a result. However, AWS is the same.

I do not use tech support. I use online forums, etc.

AWS. I started a new job.

No, it is simpler in Azure than in AWS.

In-house.

Pricing is the worst aspect of both AWS and Azure. It is very difficult to predict costs in my experience. There is often a base price (for running a VM for example), but then you have to pay for data storage costs plus data transmission costs, etc. I would prefer to have a predictable monthly cost for unlimited storage within a bandwidth for example, but there isn't an easy way to predict costs.

I evaluated Google Cloud too and compared AWS with Azure. Azure is definitely the best for me; I am more productive because I understand the tech architecture better.

If you are a C#, .NET or SQL server person, do not even think about using AWS, use Azure instead. If you are more of a Linux/PHP/Java type of person, you may consider AWS as it works much better from the command line and much more like a Linux or Java environment.