Microsoft Azure Reviews

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. 

This year, we built our own data center, and we use this solution to extend it into the cloud.

We have implemented the ExpressRoute connection, which is an established circuit between the local provider and the Microsoft network edge. This leads you directly to the Microsoft data center.

The digital workload transfers from on-premises here to the Azure cloud, which is a hybrid model. We have two different zones in Azure. One is for the intranet, and the other is for the internet.

The most valuable feature is the performance for our digital workloads.

At times, the support is terrible. It is not bad all of the time, but many times when we have contacted them, there are juniors without refined knowledge. We have had instances where it takes a long time to solve just a single problem.

We have been using Microsoft Azure for the past two years.

The stability depends on the customer. They decide the compute and other things, such as the level of support. If they take premium support then the SLA given by Microsoft is higher than when you choose a virtual machine without premium.

At the moment, we are reviewing and studying how to migrate our full workload to the cloud. We have one datacenter with more than 120 virtual machines and we are learning how to do the migration. Once it is achieved, the hybrid model we have can become a public model.

Our design was complex because we wanted it done in a certain way. There were lots of things to be done. We just experienced problems in the firewall's compatibility with Azure because when you implement a firewall, it's not as straightforward as in the case when you implement it on-premises. This led to some challenges and we had to troubleshoot the deployment of one firewall for a full month.

Even the local providers did not have experience with how to deploy that one firewall, which is why we spent so much time troubleshooting. It turns out that when you deploy a firewall on-premises and you want to migrate to the cloud, there are certain considerations that you have to keep in mind, which makes it more complex.

For our second firewall implementation, it was faster and better.

Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis.

This is definitely a product that I recommend, but it has to be done smartly. Not everything can be migrated and you shouldn't try to migrate everything as-is. It has to be done properly and people have to understand how services that are to be migrated need to be done. Also, there are some services that should not be migrated because it is better to keep them on your own cloud. This should all be studied in advance.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The solution is mainly used for setting up a big data platform on Azure and using some Azure items to navigate the data links and Data Factory.

The solution is quite flexible.

The product has been very stable for us so far.

You can scale the solution if you need to.

The solution needs to be easier to configure in the future. Right now, it's a bit difficult to accomplish.

Technical support could be better. They need to be more responsive.

The documentation should be more accessible. It's hard to find what we need right now.

It would be helpful if there was more data science or AI implemented in future versions.

The product needs to implement more API capabilities.

I've had about two years of experience using this solution.

We've found the stability to be quite good. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

We can scale the solution well. If a company wants to scale the solution, they can do so pretty easily.

We have about 20-50 people on the solution currently. We do plan to continue to use it in the future.

I've been in touch with technical support and I haven't found them to be overly helpful. They need to improve their support services. The answers take too long to get. We shouldn't have to wait for as long as we do. I'd say, at this point, we aren't exactly satisfied with the level of service they provide to their clients.

We previously used AWS. We simply used it for benchmarking.

I can't speak to the initial setup as I didn't have any experience with it. I wasn't part of the implementation process.

I did mage the Azure DevOps deployment.

We're just a customer and an end-user. We don't have a business relationship with Microsoft.

I'd recommend the solution for larger clients, especially if they are based in Europe or America.

In general, on a scale from one to ten, I'd rate this product at a seven. It's been mostly good for us. However, it could use much better technical support and documentation to make things easier.

Our primary use case is Infrastructure as a Service. We use it for SaaS applications, as well.

Azure is very flexible and easy to manage.

The interface and usage are nice.

Previously, there was no IP group, but they have since implemented that and it has become better.

For some use cases, Microsoft Azure is okay and working, but it is lacking features and we cannot implement it fully.

Talking from a networking perspective, when you create a file or a rule in Azure and you want to view this IP group, sometimes the way it is displayed on the GUI, you don't see the name of the group. At a minimum, I should be able to see the name of the group. They need to improve the GUI with respect to creating files or files. In summary, on that GUI view for firewall rules creation, the IP groups that are chosen in the firewall are not easily seen.

If I want to track, for example, a soft IP group, and mistakingly I click the wrong thing, then it's a problem. They need to improve it so that you can just view it, read-only, and then edit it later if needed.

I have been working with Microsoft Azure for approximately three years.

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten, as they are still developing. 

We have approximately 500 users.

The technical support is very good.

In my own workstream, I've not had cause to work with Microsoft support. However, my teammates from the department have been in contact with them.

The initial setup is straightforward. I can say that because my use case was greenfield, starting out fresh. It was a whole new installation and everything was straightforward.

It took between a month and two to deploy. The installation is not a big deal once you have the necessary license, and then you can begin testing.

This is a product that is fast-growing and they are gaining popularity. We have invested in it, and plan to keep using it for the next five or ten years.

In my opinion, it is an awesome product. Microsoft is everywhere and it predates the cloud. Everything that they have is easy to use.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are faster to market with greater integration of the development and infrastructure teams.

Develop solutions quickly using the normal toolset be it either as developer, IT, DevOps or BI. Expand into new world via AI and Machine Learning.

Update two years later.... Microsoft Azure continue to expand its Platform as a Service value and has set itself apart from other cloud providers that are focused on the IaaS world. If you are a Microsoft house e.g. Visual Studio, .Net, Xamarin, O365, Windows Server or Windows Users this is a clear winner. It is easy to expand you in-house, in-data center knowledge into the cloud and Microsoft's enablement of hybrid/spanning on-premise with Cloud makes transitions easy.

In general, the entire suite of PaaS is valuable. It enables a true breakdown of IT siloes and allows an organization to embrace DevOps. It speeds up micro-service architectures and provides interesting and new opportunities to staff, generating morale boosts.

Two years later..... This has been resolved by Microsoft. There is now starting to be the challenge of figuring out which service you want to use and it is no always clear which PaaS is best for the job. This is Microsoft achilles heal across its services.

Predictability and quality need improvement. Make sure things work predictably, as expected, and are documented.

As my organization learned the new tooling that Azure provides we encountered topics where the behavior of the PaaS Resource was behaving slightly different than expected and outlined in the documentation. We usually would open a service request on the topic and be told that it is supposed to work as we expected but there is a problem and Microsoft provided a work around. An example of such a topic was IAM where a contributor on a resource group who were creating a Storage resource were told they were not authorized. The main reason was around the registration of the resource that had to be done by an administrator and manually as a one-time task. Talking to Microsoft they admitted this was an error. This was for us predominant for Storage Accounts but it did occur for some other resources as well.

The second topic we encountered were related to VM’s that would suddenly and without warning would go offline. Response from Microsoft support request was that as long as the SLA is below 99.95% they cannot do anything. Obviously you can expand the resource and the cost using a availability set, fault domains etc. but my expectations was that VM’s would only be taken down for maintenance with prior notification. This one is less critical as I agree that you need to design your VM’s using the high availability features.

I have not seen any stability issues. High availability and reliability is good if you follow Microsoft development practices.

Provides fast scalability, based on demand.

Technical support is outstanding. They provide fast and high quality support, even with lower support contracts.

I used traditional data center solutions.

The setup was complex. There is a lot of training that needs to occur with both development teams and infrastructure teams. It is a different approach. In some ways, it is more structured.

Keep to PaaS to gain the optimal benefits from an OPEX finance and resource perspective.

I also use AWS. While AWS is ahead in the IaaS technology, for a Microsoft shop, Azure is more aligned to skills.

Learn and spend up-front time on training the organization.

By migrating our infrastructure to Azure, we have been more agile on several fronts as an organization, from been able to create proof of concepts on the fly, to being able to make changes quickly and repeatedly.

• Compute (App service, and virtual machine scale sets): The ability to manage Windows and Linus virtual machines.

• Monitoring and Management: Ability to use log analytics to search, collect and visualize machine data from on-premises and cloud.

• Data Analytics: Security and Identity (Azure Active Directory): This feature adds multi-factor authentication, self-service password reset and group-based application access.

• Storage (Azure files): Still in preview at this stage, its allows the creating of SMB 2.1 shared folders on Azure storage service.

• Azure Site Recovery: Allows the replication and recovery of VMs hosted on Azure, thereby extending business values of almost any size.

• Networking (Azure ExpressRoute): This feature allows the connection of data center with Azure via private link that does not travel over the internet. Advantages include security, lower latency and higher reliability.

Every area of the product still needs to improve as it can always get better. Windows wasn't where it is today decades ago. There was a continuous improvement and evolutionary changes. Same is expected of Microsoft Azure.

Specifically, I would like to see better Azure Data Analytics and monitoring RF.

Azure is very stable with no issues at all.

The ability to scale easily is one of Microsoft Azure strength, one can start and scale up as traffic increase or as the business growth is required. So we didn't have issues with scalability.

The technical support is great.

We never used a different solution. We had a PoC with every vendor in the same competitive space and decided to go with the best.

The initial setup was very straightforward, as we knew what is required from the technical perspective and as a business. Which we specified in an architectural design before hand.

Make use of Azure pricing calculator and you will find out that Azure Is still more reasonable that the competition and do your research, when unclear speak with your MS support.

We evaluated some other competitive products and decided to go with Azure as its suit and meet our business requirement.

You need to have a clear vision of your business expectation from the product. Define your business requirements, objectives and ensure that your cloud provider can support those requirements.

Consider the cost, location, licensing, and technical capability to support and guide your organization.

Features such as Azure object storage, IaaS, Azure System Center, Azure SQL Database are valuable to me.

It provides:

• Scalable workload with elastic cloud capabilities

• Hybrid IT management of the on-premise and cloud workloads

• Disaster recovery

Azure is growing its open-source offerings and I see this as a continuous area of improvement.

I have used this solution for six years.

Early on, there were issues with the workload interruptions. Over the past 12 months, it has been a stable cloud service.

There were no issues with its scalability.

Technical support is one of Azure’s strengths, I would rate it above average to excellent.

I previously used Savvis and Verizon’s IaaS Enterprise Cloud solutions.

The initial setup was moderately complex. The use of PowerShell greatly increases the ability to fine-tune workloads, i.e., after the initial setup was completed.

If you have the existing on-premise licenses, make sure to ask for their special licensing promotions so as to allow consolidation of licenses and subscriptions, in order to maximize the current investment and control TCO.

We looked at other solutions such as AWS, Google's Cloud Platform and Terremark/Verizon.

Leverage their cloud credit program so as to allow your team to become acquainted with Azure, before turning on their cloud billing services.

The availability of the humongous amount of features and solutions in Azure are most valuable to us.

The continuous improvement of Microsoft is amazing. The agility and speed at which Microsoft is doing all this is really amazing.

The improvements are more on the partner's part than on the product's part. It is difficult to keep up with the continuous improvements that Microsoft is doing.

Issues were seen in the size and unclear configuration settings. If the bandwidth is limited, it can be an issue when migrating from on-prem to off-prem.

We have implemented this for our customers since the very beginning.

This depends on the support contract which you subscribe to. The free support is bad, but the paid versions have better support, i.e., more you pay, the better the support.

The other solutions that we had used before were on-premise solutions. We saw a major shift of the resources towards Microsoft Azure.

The setup was straightforward; with the help of TechNet, if there were any issues then they were easily solvable.

In regards to the pricing and licensing, you need to be aware of what to do. If it fits in your current licensing contract, add it to that contract. If not, then depending on the company's size, ask the reseller with whom you are doing business (or ask me) for advice on this issue.

We did evaluate other solutions and, in some cases, we also advised for this product, as it is specific to certain workloads. AWS and Google are the other vendors that we looked at.

Have a vendor agnostic partner to look at your environment and discuss the vision you have on this.