Microsoft Azure Reviews

We have developed for our customers a website where they do onsite inspections of heavy moving equipment. They have the ability to build reports that are all web-based now and by clicking a button it goes out to their customers. This company is now starting to roll it out. They started in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and South Africa. They are currently expanding the system to Brazil and Australia. We had to move from on-premise solutions to a cloud-based system and this what we are using Azure for.

We have found the most valuable feature to be the pricing calculator.

The solution could be easier to use. However, when comparing it to AWS it is a bit easier.

In an upcoming release, the interface could improve.

I have been using this solution for approximately two months.

Azure is reliable. I am doing other work for another company where I do not host it in Azure myself, but they have a U-systems running on Azure and it is operating all over the world. There are times when it can slow down a little but most of the time, it runs very smoothly.

We have two people using this solution in my organization.

I have one experience calling the technical support for Azure and the response was almost immediate, they are very good.

I have used AWS previously. Although AWS might be cheaper in some instances, I found it has an even worse configuration. You have to configure every detail, whereas with Azure it easier.

The installation was straightforward. Once you have a Microsoft ID everything else just falls into place.

I am currently on a pay-as-you-go subscription and my customers are going to be on a three-year contract. For what is offered in the three-year package it is quite reasonably priced. However, if I was to run it in my office from my own service it would be cheaper but the risk is too high. Here in South Africa, we have something called load shedding where the electricity is turned off for periods of time to regulate to load of the electricity being used. It can go off for five to six hours causing the batteries in the cell towers and fiber exchanges to start dropping and then the customers are offline.

This is why I have to move to a cloud platform that has generators, redundancy on fiber connections, and other mechanisms in place. It creates a lot of challenges for us.

Microsoft has two data centers in South Africa, one in Johannesburg and one in Cape Town. We will most likely be balancing between South Africa, Europe, and maybe even have a service in Australia.

I would advise others to do their research before they purchase any platform service. Everything could look fine on the surface but if you do not understand things, such as DPUs and flexible databases, you can run into some difficulties.

I rate Microsoft Azure an eight out of ten.

We use Microsoft Azure to host our software development solutions and solutions for reproduction.

We have many solutions running alongside Microsoft Azure that are mainly for the financial sector.

We use Microsoft Azure to host and develop.

It's great! It's very useful.

It has a separate environment for developers and developers' solutions. We have environments for PaaS and quality assurance, and we also have an environment where we can lend our solutions to our customers.

We like the Azure DevOps.

If you have large traffic amounts, Microsoft Azure will continue to provide our customers with the best storage experience.

It's very secure.

Microsoft Azure has incredible customization.

It's not user-friendly because it is made for developers. A normal user can't use it, but for a developer, it is a very friendly solution.

The initial setup can be improved. It should be simplified and made easier for developers to set it up.

I would like to see the use of Microsoft DevOps simplified. It's automation to develop and deploy software that is very difficult to use. It is so complicated and we need extra time to learn it. It is not easy. 

I have been working with Microsoft Azure since 2016.

We use the standard S3 applications.

Microsoft Azure is very reliable. It's a highly stable solution.

Microsoft Azure offers huge scalability. We can manage scalability automatically or manually. It is very fast and very reliable.

We have approximately 30 users in our organization who use Microsoft Azure.

The service is very good. They are highly technical and provide answers to things that are not easy to apply. Before the pandemic, at least, the support was good and very fast. 

We had some issues with support after the pandemic, where the replies took a very long time. Technical support could improve their response time. They should respond faster.

We use many Microsoft tools, such as Microsoft Teams, also Skype, and Google Meet.

The initials setup is difficult. It requires specialists. 

Similar to Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, it is complex.

It can take six to twelve months to deploy this solution.

We had help from specialists to help with the complex setup. It is not easy for everyone.

I would suggest calling a specialist who is certified to help with the setup and the deployment, don't do it yourself. The specialists are reliable and can deploy the solution faster.

I would rate Microsoft Azure a ten out of ten.

I'm currently trying to build a new product for my company using Microsoft Azure. Prior to that, I was using Microsoft Azure on the cloud to deploy microservices using specific Azure services to host the microservices. But the most common Azure services that we're using is the App Service and relational databases. In terms of the application, the first one was just the Microsoft Azure application and the second one was an integration with Elastic Stack. I'm a software architect.

The user interface offers a good experience, it's better than Azure itself. The portal is great. Microsoft Azure has very good documentation for any kind of technical person.

Sometimes the Azure Calculator doesn't have a good way to do a higher estimate, because for any organization there are sometimes issues with the application sites, but I know that the logs are not the real time and there are issues with login synchronization. It cam sometimes take more than five minutes for that information to reach the Azure application side. I'd like to see integration with other lifecycle managing rules because with Azure DevOps, it's straightforward, but the system is painful sometimes. 

I've been using this solution for nearly five years, the last 12 months in this new company. 

In general, stability is good, but in the past month I had some issues with the connection to Azure resources, not just Microsoft Azure, but with Azure in general. Microsoft has an issue with its authentication system which has proved painful, because my applications were up and running, but I can't log in to make changes or see metrics. It's a lot better now, we've had the application down three or four times but it hasn't been critical. 

Scalability is good, I haven't had any issues with their configuration. I think we have around 600 concurrent users. 

I haven't used Azure support. They have good documentation, although I sometimes think that the examples on GitHub aren't updated. On the whole, documentation is good. 

We previously used AWS but we knew there was already a lot of experience with Microsoft Azure and their technologies and we wanted to use all the features for each service. Given that this is with government and the integration is with Microsoft Azure, we can use all the features and benefits of each service. Another issue is that they were using AWS with infrastructure as a service, but they redesigned this application to use software as a service and platform as a service. We dropped the use of infrastructure as a service and using the platform as a service, and it was estimated that it would cost less than with AWS.

I think the initial setup is straightforward. I have around 20 microservices, so deployment took probably two weeks. It took longer than a previous implementation which took several hours.

We did a quick check with cloud computing, but we didn't find anything really efficient outside of the Google Kubernetes Engine that was better than the Azure Kubernetes Service or the Kubernetes service in AWS. But it was just a quick check and it was documented.

I can sometimes see that Microsoft has poor training, but to be honest the whole training thing isn't good at a technical level. They are designed to be the entrance point and show the way you can create a web portal and database. But if they could offer an in-depth technical solution of Azure services that would be good. It's possible that Google has something about it and they can offer better learning than Microsoft sometimes does. Reading through their documentation can take some time. 

I rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

I primarily used the solution for hypothetical cases. I used the solution to look at the 2019 active directory environment, some remote SQL storage, and storage access from on-premises to the cloud.

There's a feature for automated tasks. As an administrator, handling administrative-type tasks, it's quite useful. For example, I was spending lots of money when I would spin things up. I'd spin up a SQL server. I'd spin up different types of things. They cost a lot of money. I would get distracted, walk away, and go to bed. I'd get up in the morning, and I'd see I'd have a bill. Therefore, I spun up an automated task and wrote a PowerShell script, put it in an automated task, and it would run at seven o'clock every night, and delete all my resources. It saved me money.

You can build an environment in minutes. It's very good in terms of being an infrastructure as a service, and I found that really fascinating.

All the devices they have up there that replace existing devices in the real world like load balancers or F5 are helpful. I'm not sure how they relate or how they form compared to F5, or the firewalls compare to the ones that are in data centers, however, they looked all right to me.

The solution is mostly stable.

The product scales extremely well.

It's a bit of a mystery how the storage is going to perform. For example, when you've got a storage device like Hitachi or NetApp, you can run reports on that storage and you can do all this good stuff. I'm not sure if that's the case with Azure. A lot of the stuff is kind of proprietary, at the moment.

The cost is quite high.

You can't control the data as much as you would like to. When it's theirs, it's theirs. With Hitachi, Hitachi has its own policies. You can move data around based on how much it's used into lower-cost discs and whatnot. You might be able to do that with Azure. However, I can't verify that.

The initial setup is complex.

They need to make storage easy and offer more interconnectivity between solutions.

I've used the solution for about a year or so. Maybe a year and a half at most. It hasn't been that long.

In terms of stability, I've seen it go down twice now. They've had two problems with the active directory. That said, I would describe it as stable. They have different sites, regions, and whatnot, where you can move your data around in case you lose a data center or you lose a region. However, if you lose the active directory, that can take everything down.

It's not any more stable than an enterprise environment, to be honest. Maybe a little bit, however, if you lose a network connection to it, that's not stable.

I worked in a bank, a huge 50,000 employee enterprise. I saw their infrastructure go up and down about the same, once or twice a year. That's about the same as Azure, therefore, it's not anything different than an enterprise. You can make an enterprise resilient if you have lots of domain controllers and you do lots of redundant paths. 

The solution is very scalable. It's one of its great selling points. If a company needs to scale, it can do so with ease.

I've never been in touch with technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are.

For a layperson or someone who is not trained, it wasn't an easy initial setup. It had some complexities.

I've personally gotten used to the process. The deployment, for example, wouldn't take that long now. While in the beginning, a deployment might take a month, now that I am more comfortable with the solution and more familiar, I can likely do it in a few days. 

That said, it depends on a company's plans and its own unique environment and complexities. It can vary. Most people seem to struggle with all of the connections they had before.

The number of people you need to deploy or maintain the solution really depends on the size of the environment. After implementation, you could probably scale back your employees from 10% to 50% with Azure.

I can handle an implementation myself. I'm getting better and faster at it.

I've found the cost to be a bit high. You also get dinged for extra things along the way.

The charges are also unpredictable. Even if you think something is a relatively static item, they'll charge you for it and it will change your expectation of the cost.

I've looked at other solutions, such as Hitachi and Netapp.

The biggest struggle a person would have these days, as an architect, is to determine what the cost-benefit of going to Azure would be rather than going to a storage device such as a Hitachi or a NetApp. Which has better value? What's going to be better in the next couple of years? You can really get screwed if you're going to be pulling data down from the cloud. If you pull a lot of data from the cloud, it's going to cost you. You don't get charged for putting it up. You get charged for pulling it down.

I basically used the solution to study.

I used a few different deployment models. I made an on-prem environment, Hyper-V environment, on my laptop and I connected it to the cloud.

I'd advise those considering the solution to not put all of their eggs in one basket. By that, I mean, it's a good idea to go hybrid and not full cloud. Going hybrid covers that network loss that you could suffer if you lose the network. If you lost a data center or a region, you could still have your on-prem server running an image of the cloud onsite.

I'd give the solution an eight out of ten. I haven't had a chance to study AWS or Google, however, I like this solution very much.

The primary use case of this solution is generally for infrastructure service, and also for VC-migrations and district modernization using the platform service. We're a consulting firm so we use this solution and also deploy it for our customers. I'm an architect/project manager and we are partners of Microsoft.

The main beneficial features the product provides are security, scalability, and elasticity.

The technical support could be improved. When we leave tickets, it can take some days before the issue is dealt with. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

We haven't had any issues with stability in the last 12 months, prior to that there were some small problems. 

The scalability is good, most of our clients are enterprise size organizations. 

The initial setup is straightforward, the environment is mature with a lot of documentation. 

The price of the solution is okay although it depends on the region of the deployment.

A company should look at the suitability for their use case before choosing a solution. 

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

I primarily use Microsoft Azure for application development in our development environment.

The solution is pretty dynamic.

We prefer that we can configure our environment very quickly. 

We can add some notes if we need to. The testing capabilities are great. We can use the load balancing environment, and we can test a lot of different components from an infrastructure point of view. We can also test different scenarios within the application. 

The solution is very simple to use. It has a lot of great practical applications we really appreciate.

The licensing model is not ideal. It is not very useful in predicting actual costs. Sometimes we found that we could not accurately predict how much specific products will cost the company in the future. Just now, for example, we want to start using Log Analytics for Office 365, however, we don't know the final price. It's inconvenient for us as we cannot predict the budget and it puts off making a decision. For Microsoft, it's very disadvantagous.

The solution could use mutual segmentation for servers. It would be ideal if you could constitute something like five or 15 groups among the groups of different computers inside Azure. If you could get something like logical groups of servers outside the mutual servers, it would be an improvement. 

Sometimes we want to start and do a penetration test. If, for example, we're planning new security scanning for our customers. You have to inform Microsoft that you want to start a penetration test. If you have regular scans Microsoft should allow regular scanning, without having to plan and to ask for approval from the Microsoft side every time. When it's meant to be a regular occurrence, it's very inconvenient for us.

The stability of the solution is pretty good. It doesn't cause bottlenecks or any other major issues for us. We find it to be reliable.

While we can dynamically add servers according to the user request, it's not profitable for us. Currently, it is possible to scale the solution. It just costs more to do so.

We are not so satisfied with technical support right now. Sometimes they cannot help us. We had problems with licensing and with the invoicing and so on and so on. Sometimes it's not very easy to explain the problems, the technical or non-technical, and they can't really assist us effectively.

In one instance, we had an issue with anti-spam on the service. We were trying to figure out why certain emails were being marked as spam. It took far too long to get to the bottom of the cause.

It's hard to gauge what the pricing will be, so It's hard to plan with the solution. The licensing needs to be more transparent and obvious.

We're simply Microsoft customers. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten. We're mostly happy with it, although we would prefer if pricing was more transparent.

Implementation of Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery solution, where we used Carbonite Availability as the primary tool and Microsoft Azure as secondary/target location.

Real-time replication configured from one point to another for business continuity and high availability. 

Altogether, there are eight servers in the local premise which are entirely replicated to the cloud. The kept cloud servers are idle until a disaster happens with the on-premise servers. The project setup was successful even with real-time testing. It was done with automatic failover and failback.  

It has improved our organization. 

It was very user-friendly when setting up the virtual machines and console. It was an easy task for my team to create virtual servers and start replications. 

We able to manage resources wisely with a third-party tool.  

It should have cost optimization tools. Customers are required to use third-party applications to avoid usage complications. Also, charging on downloads is not a good option, especially when it moves to a production server. 

Two years.

Achieving business continuity was a nightmare. Project was done for a supermarket chain where they kept one machine in every branch directly connected to remote data center. The connection was done using VDIs. Whenever there is glitch at the remote data center, the entire infrastructure was in trouble, which in turns affected the business a lot. Setting up a disaster recovery data center was an expensive plan and maintenance was too heavy. Connecting Carbonite Availability with Azure was an easy options, as it reduced overhead and maintenance.

Monthly billing convenience reduced cost overheads up to 70 percent.

We are going to use Microsoft Azure to move some on-premise servers into the cloud so that our data can be held there.

We are now trying to decide exactly this. Where can it improve our daily business?

Microsoft Azure can be pretty advanced and difficult to understand. I would like it to be simplified. The licensing especially needs to be simplified.

We have not been using Microsoft Azure for very long, about three months. My company has asked me to look for a better solution in terms of security perspective. They have asked me to technically go through to see if there is a real need to change or not, and what the new features are.

The stability of Microsoft Azure has been very good from what we have seen.

I have not actually gone through the initial setup yet. So I am trying to figure that out. They want me to go through the training so I can understand the setup.

So far we are satisfied with the pricing of Microsoft Azure.

We are also looking into other platforms. Perhaps an open-source platform.

I would rate Microsoft Azure at an eight out of a scale of ten.