Microsoft Azure Reviews

Building development and production environments to support business acrivity.

Getting resources up and running quickly and providing secure access to those resources makes life easier. Also, Microsoft Azure really does offer a great deal which allows one to completely think about software development in new ways. I love the WebApps feature and am currently learning everything I can about Logic apps.

I am really into the Everything as a Service model that Azure seems to be heading towards. Less fussing over VM's and Operating Systems.

The ability to quickly create and manage resources is critical to getting things done, Azure just makes getting things done a lot simpler.

You eventually end up with a large collection of 'bits' all working together, I find it hard to be able to create a logical 'box' and put all the 'bits' that need to be in that box / application into the one place.

We're still learning though, so odds are there's something that will help us with this already in Azure.

No, so far we've had no problems with anything we've deployed onto Microsoft Azure, rock solid.

At our early stage we've not encountered any scalability issues at all, and we're not likely to either, Azure will easily handle whatever workload we plan to throw at it.

Customer Service:

Excellent! I raised a support ticket on a question I had and got a prompt, clearly articulated and knowledgeable reply from the Microsoft Technical support person which addressed our question in a very short time-frame.

Technical Support:

Excellent! Was very impressed with the person I liaised with.

I was using an on-premises solution with servers running a HyperVisor, we were due to replace old hardware and needed to make resources available everywhere the team is, Microsoft Azure 'just made sense'.

Setting up was quite simple, before jumping in though make sure you watch some of the video's on the MVA site about virtual networking and so forth, the Azure user interface makes deploying these resources relatively straight-forward.

We went in-house, learning as we go. We're still very new to Azure and learning all the time, we'd be beginner to intermediate at most. We're not deploying to production for some time and will work with a Certified Microsoft Partner when we get to that stage.

Several thousand dollars and counting, we haven't needed to upgrade on premises hardware (In fact we eliminated all of the old on-premises hardware and run 100% on Azure) or pay for it's maintenance, power etc.

Understand and use the pricing calculator!

Learn PowerShell, a quick tip is that you can shut down and de-allocate your VM's when you are not using them, this way the VM's are not incurring charges. We absolutely love this feature, as it means that when the environment is not in use, it isn't costing much (if anything), so it lends itself to making the I.T environment more efficient.

We looked at AWS, but we chose Azure because we use a lot of Microsoft Products and it just felt more integrated.

Start with the simple things first, design your environment before deploying anything, even a simple development environment. Understand the charging model used and get to grips with the basics of PowerShell, as nice as the web based front end is, PowerShell is very handy.

We use Azure for DevOps, to host numerous applications that are critical to our business, and we run our software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering exclusively from Azure.

Azure Active Directory: Has powerful security and auditing capabilities that we use to secure all our apps.

Azure File services – Comes in handy often when we need a staging place for content.

Block Blob storage – Reliable and low cost for long-term storage of important information.

Azure Regions – We leverage Azure regions around the world; we love the flexibility and ease at which we can deploy and manage resources for our global clients.

The Azure Billing API could be so much better. It only provides billing metrics for a set duration. For example, if you want to look at billing for a week /month/some other duration, then you have to make all the calls, store the data separately, and run your own computation to get the results that you need. Obviously, the billing system already has all of this data, so the API should just give you parameters to specify the billing duration and return the figures accordingly.

There were very minor issues related to billing. For example, sometimes under accounts with the Enterprise Agreements, we see that storage accounts are missing access to the activity costs.

There were no scalability issues experience this far.

The level of technical support is low.

In general, there is a small learning curve in regards to the public cloud concepts and the Azure user portal, but nothing terrible.

Be careful with Azure Cool storage accounts; if you are dealing with high object counts, then it can be more economical to use Hot storage because of the high storage access costs associated with Cool.

We considered the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), but decided to use Microsoft Azure for a few reasons.

First, we believe that Microsoft will emerge as the preferred public cloud provider for the enterprise-class workloads and scenarios. Second, for our development goals, we could not spread ourselves thin by supporting multiple public cloud providers. Another reason is that most of our clients are using Office 365 and are Microsoft Azure clients themselves. Thus, it is more efficient for our solution and for the work that we perform, to be local to their existing applications/data. Finally, Microsoft Stack is something that we are already familiar with, and Azure being Microsoft, we felt it matched best with our knowledge and expertise.

Make sure you understand the cloud’s pricing model. Depending on your scenario, i.e., in rare cases, it may be more economical to do things on-premises.

Regarding some of the SaaS offerings in Azure, again, understand the pricing because it might make sense to leverage what they have as a service. In some cases, you may want to build it and manage it yourself.

Also, pay attention to which Azure Region you spin up compute and storage because the pricing can vary between regions and not all the offerings are equal across the regions.

We use it internally to manage all of our clients, but it also helps us connect with different customers located globally.

It is a very straightforward solution that provides a wide range of services. I highly appreciate its help availability. If there is any issue in operating, it only takes to Google a solution and it can be easily fixed.

I would recommend some enhancement regarding integration features. 

Our company has been utilizing Microsoft Azure for five to six years. 

Microsoft Azure is a very stable solution. 

It offers good scalability. 

Our experience with their customer service is satisfactory. We find it valuable that numerous essential information are readily accessible. 

Positive

The initial setup was seamless and very fast. It took a few hours to complete the whole process. 

The deployment process was efficient and fast. Due to the complexity and extensive range of services and configuration options, it took a significant number of IT professionals to execute the task. 

Microsoft Azure provides a reliable cloud platform and comprehensive services so it would be a great choice for first-time users. I am rating it eight out of ten. 

We are using Microsoft Azure mainly for our test environment. Addiotanlly, we use it for our enterprise resource management as we have installed a SaaS solution.

The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure is it has everything together in one place. It is one large tool with lots of small tools that are updated often.

I have found that if you not working with Microsoft Azure's GUI every day, it's not very user-friendly. It changes very often and fast. They are implementing new functionality. If you're not working with it every day, it always takes you additional time to get acquainted with the GUI. You always have to know all the tools because it's one software solution where you work with different kinds of tools to achieve results by implementing policies and other parameters. It would be better if they had everything in one place so that it is clear what type of operations we are doing, such as DLP. However, that's is how it is with all of the tools of Microsoft Azure at the moment.

There is a need to be better on-premise solutions that are more helpful. However, I don't think that is the goal of Microsoft Azure. They want the solution to be secure cloud solutions with cloud applications. This is their main goal at the moment.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for approximately five years.

The performance of Microsoft Azure depends on whether you have good bandwidth for your data connection, if the connection is strong then the performance is good. If you have a very poor connection, then it's can be a little slow, but has been okay.

We have one administrator and one system engineer that are using the solution. They are doing the administration for our solution. We're not a big company, we have 19 employees.

We haven't tried to scale Microsoft Azure. It's not necessary for us to scale it at the moment. We have started out with one issue where we needed it and for very sensible documentation, now we are using it in different kinds of projects. For example, for many types of data classifications.

If it's necessary we will increase usage. Otherwise, we will keep the same amount of usage.

The technical support of Microsoft Azure was helpful. They were very good because they spoke the same language as we did. We both spoke German. It worked very well, we have no complaints.

Some of the aspects of the implementation of the solution are very easy if you know which tool you have to use. It's not too complicated if you know which tool you will be using but to find the right tool to do the necessary functions sometimes takes some time. I'm not doing the setup every day. I have one engineer that it is his job. But nevertheless, I also want to do the setup to know how it's working.

I am not sure how long the implementation took for our DLP project, once we started the implementation we started to use other tools and eventually returned to the main project.

We did the implementation internally.

We have one engineer that is administrating and supporting Microsoft Azure.

With every cloud solution, you have to know what you need and the cost can be fine. The price can be a little bit high depending on how you manage your costs, but overall it's still a bit cheaper than an on-premise solution but with the advantage of flexibility. You're always up to date with the software, you only need to use it. You no longer have to be concerned with the on-premise physical security. We do not need to create a data center, it's more convenient for us.

Some of our customers are looking for on-premise solutions other than Microsoft Azure which is cloud-based. We help them find the solutions they need.

My advice to others thinking about using this solution is to try it out. There are features which are very good and some other features where you should watch out but that's for every solution, you have pros and cons. When you're a small company, try everything out that is offered by Microsoft because they're one of the best. Microsoft is still the market leader in a lot of fields. I would suggest using Microsoft tools if they fit the relevant use case. If the solution does not fit the use case, or you need more security or other aspects, then you can look around for other tools. additionally, on the marketplace, Microsoft provides enough other tools you could use.

I rate Microsoft Azure an eight out of ten.

We are using Microsoft Azure for the UAT environment and data warehousing purposes.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for approximately seven years.

The solution is stable.

Microsoft Azure is scalable.

We have 12,000 users using this solution.

I use other cloud services, such as Amazon AWS and Google Cloud services.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We have a team of 30 that does the implementation of the solution.

We are on a monthly subscription for Microsoft Azure and the cost is more expensive than some of the competitors, such as Amazon AWS. They should be more competitive with other solutions.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Microsoft Azure a seven out of ten.

We are customers of Microsoft and I'm an IT architect.

The solution reduces work for our IT teams. They don't have to keep things up to date, and we can concentrate on our mission. The best feature for us is the help we get from Microsoft to migrate applications to the latest release and support efforts. It saves us a lot of time. 

The cost is a big issue, it can quickly go up if you don't control things. We've set up a system that shuts down machines regularly so we don't run up costs. Sometimes our development teams start up machines and forget to shut them down, and we see our costs go up quite rapidly with monthly surcharges. It would be helpful if Microsoft didn't change the control panels quite so often. It means we need to retrain personnel whenever things change and that seems to have an impact on our IT teams.

We've been using this solution for nearly four years. 

Stability is good and the solution is easy to maintain. 

Scalability is really awesome. We don't have to worry about it at all, we're really impressed. Everyone in the company uses Azure. 

Tech support is great. I find that we get answers quickly. It's just the first line of support that I criticize sometimes because it seems that whenever we open a ticket, they give us a run around with certain questions that basically we've answered. But as soon as we get into the next level of support, it's more advanced and questions are answered quite rapidly. Our tech guys know how to open a ticket and basically provide all the available information that they need. We sometimes have to get through that initial loop, and answer the same questions again and again, until they push us to another level of support.

Four years ago the initial setup was quite complex but lately I find it's becoming increasingly easier, and the set up rules for securities are a lot simpler. These are things that are improving all the time. 

Licensing is on an annual basis. 

If a company wants to concentrate more on their mission and less on supporting infrastructure, they should give Azure a go. I find that it saves us a lot of time.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We have been using Azure for DevOps and non-production environments. It is great when you want to deploy apps in your staging environment first using deployment slots. This allows you to flick the switch very quickly between your current prod app and the newly developed in staging to see how it behaves in the real world. If something goes wrong, you can easily switch it back.

Azure is a platform which allows our organization to be agile. It very quickly provisions servers, infrastructure, and apps on the fly and complies with security requirements and data safety.

Azure Active Directory, Azure VMs, Azure network security groups (NSG), and  monitoring endpoints across different regions to check how your platform operates from different geographic locations. Azure backups are another feature which are quite useful, especially since they allow us to backup our Azure VMs and our on-premise servers. Data can be backed up to Azure, saving time, space, and using clunky tapes to restore data, when needed.

Azure ARM console can be a bit overwhelming at the beginning. 

If you are not aware of costs, pricing, etc., you can end up with a hefty bill. However, I found that the Azure price calculator is a valuable tool to use before starting to deploy VMs in Azure. This tool will give you an overview of the costs you should expect on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis.

I have had no stability issues. It is a very stable platform and very resilient. It comes down how you set up your geo-redundant options for backups, SQL replication. and VMs which run your services/apps.

I have had no scalability issues. It is an elastic platform. It all depends how you set up your scale up options to address heavy loads, but the options are there for you to use.

Microsoft Premier support is great to deal with. They understand very quickly the scenarios and how critical a scenario can be. They provide info, support, and knowledge to address issues. 

We did not have a particular issue when implementing. It was mostly understanding all the options Azure had. We used Premier support to generate inquiries with Microsoft seeking clarification about what option was best suited for what we wanted to do.

I used AWS (Amazon Web Services), but mostly because I was involved in a project. AWS is also a great solution, but I found Azure was easier to use and it had a native integration with my current platform (Windows).

The key here is design. You need to design and orchestrate how you want your VMs (geo-redundant, in an availability set, size of VMs, etc.). It is the key to understanding the costs of each set of VMs available to you in terms of size and computing resources. Also, understand what type of storage will be required for you to deploy your virtual infrastructure SSD storage and larger disks. Plan to use this (Standard, Basic, or Premium) and it needs to be taken into consideration depending of what you want to use Azure for.

In-house deployment, as there were Azure skills on the team.

Not applicable.

Use Azure price calculator before embarking on an Azure deployment. This will help you understand straight away what your cost expectations are on a regular basis. You can always run Azure on a 30 day trial, see how you feel about it, then make the decision to switch to the full Azure usage.

In addition to AWS, I also trialed Oracle Cloud (on a smaller scale) and it is great if you are running Oracle Databases. You can also stand up your VMs and build your environment. A cool feature of Oracle Cloud is you can run a private cloud version in your data center, exactly the same experience if you are running it on a private or public cloud. The private cloud solution comes in the form of an Oracle appliance which gets configured, deployed and installed by Oracle directly in your data center.

Run Azure on a 30 day trial and see how you feel about it, then make the decision to switch to the full Azure usage. You see the reason when you view the benefits of using its cloud solution, especially one that integrates so seamlessly with your environment, collaboration tools, and apps.