Microsoft Azure Reviews

The solution is basically a platform as a service for web applications, virtual machines, Azure identity, et cetera.

My day-to-day is to migrate servers using Mover or some other app to access on-premises data centers. We then use Azure Migrate to move the servers in order to take advantage of the new functionalities and things like that.

The solution offers good monitoring features that allow us to configure items better in the customer environment. The monitoring is really awesome.

Occasionally, clients have specific requirements for their applications and we can move them onto Azure services or apps. 

Overall, it offers a better way to move the applications and monitor or configure the applications with higher availability. For example, there are load balancers, different types of layers that load balancers use, traffic managers, Front Door, and things of that nature that are available to us and the client via Azure.

Overall, I like how the solution works. It offers everything I need, for the most part.

The user interface is very nice and makes everything easy to use.

The power share modules have been improved, and the AC module was introduced - which has been great. There are ten or 15 more regions on the way as well.

The tools on offer are excellent. It has some really great environment assessment tools as well.

There are preview features we are waiting on. When I contact Microsoft support, there is no timeline given or clear information about when those preview features are going to be on GA, general availability. It would be ideal if they could finally give us at least an estimation of how much longer we have to wait.

Support could be improved. If you pay for a higher plan, it's okay, however, the lower plans don't offer as good of a service experience. It also seems as though each different tier doesn't talk to the other. they should be able to communicate and share details internally with each other so that they are learning from each other instead of staying siloed.

I've been using the solution for the last few years. I would estimate it's been about five years at this point. It's been a while. I've definitely been using the solution over the last 12 months.

In terms of stability, for me, it works. However, depends on the type of project that's happening. If you're going to have just a virtual machine running there then it can fail. That said, the platform offers a lot of options to improve the capability, so it depends on how much money a client wants to invest.

The scalability works just fine. I've had some issues before with Azure App Service, with an App Service environment allocation, however, Microsoft has improved that, making a bigger rack. Since then, I haven't seen issues with scalability. That was maybe a year ago.  

We currently have three clients on Microsoft Azure.

There is room for improvement with technical support. I work with premium support and therefore don't really face issues. We have good engineers. There are some issues when you get a new support person. They have a lot of rotation in their personnel. They train people for a couple of months. They're trying to help however, it's not the same as getting a seasoned professional. It really depends on the support line you buy. If you go for a lower tier, you're likely to get less experienced assistance.  

For the most part, the initial setup is straightforward. It was not overly complex. I worked with a Microsoft support engineer. I had contact with the product group and know the technical advisors and technical matters, which made it very easy for me.

For example, in comparison. I tried to use Amazon Web Services by myself, and I got confused as I didn't have that level of support. With Azure, the interface is nice, and it's pretty straightforward. Anybody with a little bit of technical knowledge about working, virtual machines, or similar items can use it with little to no problem. The implementation is pretty good.

The time it takes to deploy the solution depends on the customer environment. If they have 25 servers versus five there will be radically different deployment times.

Typically, we use Microsoft strategies as a foundation assessment. We'll look at the customer environment and be in the background for a couple of weeks to pull some data so we can have a better understanding of the customer environment. After that, we create a plan to start migrating the servers. Each client is unique.

I worked alongside a Microsoft support engineer who assisted in the process.

You do need to pay for technical support and there are different tiers of support you can get. The higher the tier, it seems, the better the service you can expect.

I haven't used AWS or Google Cloud, therefore I don't really ever compare this solution to them. I don't say "this platform has that and I like how this works". For me, Azure just works and it's fine and I don't need to go in-depth and look at other options.

The company I am working at new does use AWS and we're planning to introduce new cloud technologies as well. 

I'm not a salesperson, however, I can say that we would move the client to whichever technology made sense to them after doing an evaluation of their requirements. That, of course, is handled by a different department.

We are a reseller and a Microsoft Gold partner. We are a CSP, a Cloud Solution Provider. We offer managed services to our customers. We are moving data centers to Azure, however, we are a managed service provider. We have access to the customer's environment in order to pull analytics data to help them with consulting services, and things like that.

My basic advice to those considering the solution is that planning is essential. Microsoft does a good job of advising their customers at the outset to ensure they get what they need, however, it's helpful to go in and understand deeply what it is your company needs overall. 

That said, Azure is a strong cloud and its technology is great. Microsoft offers good implementation with service legal agreements and good practices.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

We wanted to deploy applications and have them interact with services on the back-end, so we deployed Azure for this. The performance has been quite good.

It was easy to deploy our applications on Azure. It provides more compatibility and scalability than the .NET application. This is why we chose to use Azure.

We are looking for the Azure to get involved in the case of other applications, like the Java application. Because it is predefined and has been set by Microsoft, who is providing better compatibility to the .NET application, so we are looking for the same from Azure for the Android app. Therefore, we are looking for better compatibility and scalability.

It is stable. I have not seen it have any downtime.

We have faced some challenges trying to deploy a new ESP application.

The technical support was good. I would give them an eight out of 10 rating.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The pricing is very competitive.

We evaluated AWS. 

If I were advising a colleague in my organization who is looking for a solution and is comparing AWS and Azure, I would prefer that they go for Azure, or any software using Microsoft technologies because we have had good experiences with them. If I were advising on Java, I wouldn't advise him to specifically use another tool rather he should do research and use my comparison history on IT Central Station.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

Most important criteria for selecting a vendor: The client will choose the license and buy it. We can try to convince them, but we can not compel them to use a specific vendor's license. Ultimately, the decision-maker is the client.

• Virtual machines, both Windows and Linux based
• Blob storage
• Azure file storage
• SQL server

This product has facilitated development, testing, rapid deployment, spot resource needs, with a remote off-site that compliments on-premises for the hybrid cloud.

The user interface is great if you like tablet, a.k.a., Windows type functionally. The PowerShell is robust. However, there is not much in between, although you can do a lot of customizing views, dashboards, and other things.

I like the extensiveness of the new VS classic interface. At times, I still find the AWS dashboards simpler and more streamlined. Nevertheless, Azure is more elegant.

I have used the product for several years.

I had no stability issues.

There were no issues, as long as your credit card can also scale.

I don't know about technical support, as I have not had to deal with them. But the various communities, forums, and resources are outstanding.

We have deployed, and continue to use:

• AWS EC2
• EBS
• S3 Glacier
• Route 53
• Lightsail
• Google
• Bluehost DPS
• An onsite mix of Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware

We are doing hybrid to address different needs.

Having used AWS, VMware, as well as Windows, there was a little bit of a learning curve, just as there was for others.

However, navigating the UI, shells, and figuring out what was where, without spending weeks in seminars, training, and watching videos, was actually pretty intuitive.

If you are not used to working with AWS or others, or if you have some tools, Azure is actually pretty extensible and getting easier to working from Windows and vice versa.

Do your homework, understand the type and sizes of resources, see if there are any extra fees, and find out what tools are needed.

Check what level of performance, availability, capacity and economic (PACE) budget, as well as the services that are needed.

Watch your costs and look for value versus the lowest cost.

We looked at AWS, Rackspace, Google, Microsoft, Bluehost, and VMware.

Don't be scared, be prepared; do your homework.

Look beyond lower cost and instead focus on value, enablement, ease of use, compatibility, resiliency, ability to scale with the stability of performance, capacity, and availability.

Look at the extensiveness of services versus a simple check box.

You also need to identify any concerns about the cloud, categorize them, and then discuss with others how to address them, or seek a workaround.

If you cannot find somebody to chat with, drop me a note.

The fully integrated capabilities of a PaaS service.

Basically we would not be building the Healthcare IT application if it were not for Azure.

The management console needs work and the pricing calculator is truly user hostile.

I have been using the solution 3 years.

We have some issues with functional differences between Azure Active Directory and how Ad is implemented on a standalone server.

We have had a few outages with Visual Studio Online – though they have not been a major work impact.

None so far.

Customer Service: Mixed. Microsoft still has too many support queues and if you end up in the wrong one you can spend hours being bounced from one to the other. OTOH once you figure out how to get to the Business support queue – response times are fantastic for “business outage” issues.Technical Support: When in the right queue – the understanding is unparalleled.

I have previously used AWS and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. Azure is a PaaS whereas AWS is a server stack environment and thus AWS does not provide the OpEx cost reductions that Azure does. Elastic Beanstalk is a PaaS but it is not as fully developed as Azure.NET is.

Very straightforward. In fact almost too much so. Its easy to try and overthink the setup and waste time looking for things you don’t need to be looking for.

Combination of in-house and vendor. Vendor team was new to Azure.

Full ROI on the current project is still to be determined as we are not shipping yet. But I would estimate a 100% cost reduction over the traditional way of building a server based app.

Our monthly dev costs for infrastucture are running $300-$500 for the initial work and we expect to have full OpEx costs of $1,000-$3,000/mo once we are launched.

AWS and Elastic Beanstalk.

Have a team that understands .NET development and particularly someone who understands Active Directory very well

I have worked in a consultant company and we have customers who migrate their services to the cloud and to modern applications and services using Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft Azure has a lot of useful features. They have databases, application services, PaaS solutions, such as platform and infrastructure services. The virtual machines' functions and services are good.

Microsoft Azure can improve by adding more features for virtual machines, such as tier virtual machines.

In an upcoming release, I would like to see more information, features, and warehouse information on data.

I have been using Microsoft Azure for approximately five years.

Microsoft Azure is highly stable. However, Microsoft could improve the availability of the services by creating availability zones that are services working active-active in different positions around the globe. If any of these positions fall down, then another position will deliver the solution. This way there is no loss of service or loss to the business.

Microsoft Azure has a lot of features for scalability. You could increase the scalability of any service, such as databases storage or virtual machines. 

Microsoft Azure technical support is not the best, they could improve the knowledge of their team and solve problems faster.

The solution can be easy to implement. You could start easily, there are some services that have simple steps, and you could speed up the entire process. However, there are some more difficult deployments in more complicated architectures. You could start easily in the solution and then you can improve your skills.

My advice to those thinking about using Microsoft Azure is to try it, it's a great service. It's a great opportunity to improve your career because there are a lot of challenges. I would recommend using the documentation and the information from the YouTube channels. There is a lot of documentation and data about Microsoft Azure available.

I rate Microsoft Azure a nine out of ten.

It is great for computer resource management at reduced cost. Also in a large environment, it gives you a lot of flexibility to provide different services, like disaster recovery and business continuity.

In terms of computer resource management and reduced cost, it is very, very effective. In large environments, it gives you a lot of flexibility to provide different services, like disaster recovery and business continuity with simple and great options because you don't have to spend a lot of time for maintenance, upgrades, and security. Also, Microsoft Azure provides a lot of services that can be managed by Microsoft like NetApp and SQL Server on a database.

Microsoft Azure has services such as ACS, Azure Container Service. This is very useful for improvements in running applications in a scalable environment. You will not need to spend time building the cluster on-premises, and you can improve your clusters with a lot of administration options.

I think Azure Active Directory and also the backup solutions provided in Azure need to be improved by Microsoft. The backup solution is not a very enterprise solution, and it is very simple. I think in comparison with other backup solutions like Nakivo and Veeam Backup, it can be improved to have a lot of options.

Along with this, one of the lack of options in Azure is managing antiviruses in virtual machines in the Azure environment. For example, if we have a lot of virtual machines on-premises and have to migrate them in Azure, there is no handy tool for the central management of antivirus software in all virtual machines in Azure.

On-premises, we have a lot of options like Kaspersky, Norton, and a lot of others, but in the Azure environment, you are limited to Windows ATP.

Windows ATP solutions are limited and can be improved by Microsoft, specifically the central management of the GUI for configuring agents on virtual machines.

I think Microsoft Azure should provide more innovation and new services to get better performance in the market.

The documentation for how to connect to CLI could also be improved.

I've been using Microsoft Azure for around three years.

It is very scalable and can be distributed to different regions.

I'm not involved in using technical support because I directly work with an Azure architect on my team who is responsible for providing support and leading the team as well as contacting the Microsoft support team. In general, however, I think, one of the best advantages of Microsoft services is the support team made up of technical engineers who help solve problems.

As for the initial setup, the GUI in Microsoft is very simple and very handy, but in Azure Container Service, it is not very handy and is very complex. You would need to go forward with CLI.

I would rate Microsoft Azure at eight on a scale from one to ten. 

Public Cloud

We're using the product as an infrastructure as a service. I'm basically using it to host services.

The product is very easy to provision. This is one of its most valuable aspects.

The solution offers pretty good integration capabilities at this time.

We've found the pricing to be pretty good so far. It's not too expensive.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The stability is quite good. It's a reliable product.

We have found the scalability to be very good.

The solution offers very good upgrades and updates regularly.

The product can be a bit confusing at times. It's not well laid out. The interface, for example, can be a bit hard to figure out and they seem to be constantly changing things on us.

It's a rather new product and therefore lacks the maturity of other options. There is much they can do to add to it and to improve it. That may likely come with more time.

Up until two or so years ago, they weren't even accepting customer feedback on the solution. They've just started to do so, and they have given users a sense that improvements will be on the way sometime in the future.

Technical support is lacking right now. It needs to be better.

We've been using the solution for more than 12 months at this point. It's been a while.

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance, overall, has been rather reliable for our organization.

The product has the capability to expand. If a company needs to scale it, it can do so. It's not a problem.

Technical support needs to be better. We are not quite satisfied with their level of support. They need to be more responsive to use when we have queries. 

We actually use Amazon as well. We did use it before, however, we are also still using it. We use both Azure and Amazon at this time.

We did not find the initial setup to be too complex. It's pretty straightforward. A company should be able to handle the deployment without too many issues.

The pricing is decent. We don't find that they are charging too much. It's pretty fair.

As a cloud deployment, the solution is constantly updating itself, therefore we always have access to the latest release.

We have about 300 to 400 users on it currently. It's a business unit with various users of different job descriptions.

We are planning to increase the usage in the future.

I'm not sure if the company will use this solution for the long term or if they are considering trying something new. That is yet to be determined.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We're mostly quite happy with it in general.

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure

• Virtual Networking
• Security
• Feature packing
• Virtual Machines
• Ease of implementation
• Azure AD
• Azure AD Directory Domain Services
• Database as a Service
• Operations Management Suite
• RBAC

Mobility, no more "metal" on-premise, cloud-based directory with SSO features, sped implementing new solutions, reduced skillset for management and reporting.

We have a full Azure plus Office 365 implementation for servers and desktops, authenticating users on Azure AD over 802.1X switching and wireless. No on-premise servers, DC's, file-servers, etc.

Stability. Microsoft is implementing changes too fast and sometimes things break.

Three years, but the full stack only since January 2017.

None.

Yes. Beware of August. Microsoft makes some big changes during this month and they have an impact on customers.

None.

Customer Service:

10 out of 10.

Technical Support:

10 out of 10.

On-premise traditional solutions.

Complex in the beginning, because the company I was migrating had some peculiarities.

The latter move was totally stable as we did a cutoff migration and no garbage was imported. Some downtime was expected, but this was minimal.

In-house, with support from a vendor team. Excellent support: 10 out of 10.

Not yet calculated since it was a major digital transformation and an ongoing project.

Setup cost is low and Microsoft may help your project financially with services from a partner.

Be sure to know your licensing or ask for advice. It's worth it. You may be led into something you don't need, if following Microsoft or a vendor.

No.

Evaluate extensibly (the actual scenario), have a definitive vision of where you want to be in a near future, align the strategy with your management and expect that it may not be cheaper. A correct vision of a project of this kind cannot be focused on lowering costs but vision alignment, future scalability, speed on delivering services, and maintaining smaller IT crews focused on business needs.

Please do some previous math regarding actual licensing versus a costs model. Extrapolate this to a five year plan to match current hardware lifespans.