Microsoft Azure Reviews

The time to market is fast compared back to the traditional on-premise hosting. That is one of the better things I can say because there is no need to worry. The Pack services will enable it to start immediately. 

I think Azure is good. We're exploring the Cosmos DB for the dealer distribution, which is in a project phase. We are happy with their services. 

They should enable more other products to enable other commercial products as a Pack services, from the database side, more from the security perspective. Some of the databases don't have the features that Azure SQL has. Those parts have to enabled.

There were also a lot of constraints with the serverless parts. They are far behind compared to AWS.

I have been using Azure for the last three years. 

The technical support is a bit clumsy. Their time to respond is not that much great.

In terms of the UCs, they are very cumbersome. It's not very user friendly.

Each deployment takes around ten minutes. We do around 300 a day.

If you look at it from the cloud product perspective, AWS is first. There is no doubt about it, and Azure is in the second position, and Google is the third.

Serverless is something that Microsoft needs to focus on, it is not so mature. That would be a game-changer.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. Not a ten because they need to improve in terms of maturity, flexibility, and user experience. 

My current project is to carry out a comparison between Azure, AWS, and GCP, the three variants of cloud in order to analyze the best possible solution. In terms of costing and services I've been carrying out a comparison between all three. We are currently building the machine learning pipeline. We're partners with Microsoft and I'm a data architect. 

The data factory is a valuable feature. I come from a hardcore Microsoft background so I was able to relate to the data factory best among all the components as it's close to my existing system. 

I think the pricing model could be improved. I have that clarity with AWS but with Azure it's not that easy. If I am building a solution on Azure, the first question that stakeholders will ask me is about the cost. If I'm using multiple services of Azure, then how do I figure that out given that it's all on cloud.

Technically, I would say there could definitely be improvement on the AutoML part, which is the machine learning component of Azure. I made a comparison between AutoML versus DataRobot, another vendor that provides machine learning. DataRobot is definitely ahead of Azure AutoML. Of course that could be because I'm using the licensed version of DataRobot versus the free version of AutoML but there does seem to be a gap. 

I've been using this solution for about six months. 

I haven't had any issues with stability. I think it's more to do with the volume of data that I am playing with which for now is only 5GB of data. I don't expect any problems.

I don't see any issue with scalability. But here again, on the cloud platform, there won't be any issue with the scalability but you need to understand the pricing. Once you have that,  scaling will never be an issue. 

The complexity or otherwise of the initial setup depends on the person who will be using it. If you take the AutoAI services from other vendors, those are more graphical, more eye pleasing versus what Microsoft offers and less complicated to implement. With Azure ML, values have to be manually fed into the columns and that's clearly going to be more time consuming. 

There are multiple players in the market and this seems to be a good solution. It really depends on the use case and on the customer. I would personally choose AWS over Azure because that's where my experience is and I'm more familiar with AWS.

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10.

Hybrid Cloud

We primarily use Azure for our ERP system and DR usage. It is set up for multiple production workloads.

This solution requires minimal administrative effort.

The scalability is good.

The most valuable feature is Azure SQL.

Improvements need to be made with respect to the availability of third-party services.

I would like to see more advanced functionality in terms of information security.

We have been using Microsoft Azure for six years.

There is room for improvement in terms of stability.

Scalability is one of the best features. We have thousands of users.

I have been in contact with technical support and would rate them better than average. I find that it takes a long time to reach somebody who is a subject matter expert. This is because they first need to escalate requests from the level one or level two helpdesk. For the problems that we have experienced, we needed support directly from people with expertise.

The initial setup is straightforward and the deployment can be completed within short time. Now we can deploy most components/services within a day or two.

When we first implemented Azure, we engaged with a third-party system integrator. Now, however, we can do everything ourselves. We have approximately five people who do the maintenance of the cloud infrastructure.

The price of Microsoft Azure is pretty good. Among the top market players, it’s usually the cheapest or the one after. Our usage is more than $1,000,000 USD annually.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that it can be a good start for SME, up to MNC who needs to see their full environment, rather than just a particular system or area.

Overall, this is a good solution but there is room for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure

• Windows and Linux compatibility
• Great front-end management interface
• Pricing based on use time

One time I needed to build an environment, but it did not exist at the time to buy the hardware and all logistics inside it. To deploy it was essential, we got a great success on the project using MS Azure.

It could be a useful process to make the marketing of MS Publisher a little area of improvement for IT professionals learn about this tool.

Two years.

No. We did not have any problem deploying it.

No. We do not have problems with stability.

No. We do not have problems with scalability.

Customer Service:

I do not use customer service.

Technical Support:

We have had great experiences using their technical support. They were very useful.

No, just on-premise and testing Amazon.

No, it is easy to configure and use.

It was implemented in-house, using our own team. Some of the professionals had already worked with Azure.

It was not calculate

The whole pricing list is published, so it is clear. When you choose the configuration, you can see the price.

Yes. On-Premise and other solutions inside the company.

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.

We have most of our servers running as VM's in Azure. While still a hybrid environment, we are gradually moving all our servers and applications to Azure.

Azure Active Directory and Azure Active Directory Domain Services make it possible to have Azure VM's join a domain without the need for additional domain controllers. Users can join their CYOD to Azure Active Directory using their Azure credentials. With MDM in place, we also have the means to manage all devices, CYOD or BYOD.

The Disaster Recovery service - Azure Site Recovery (ASR) has enabled us to have our production servers and applications replicated to Azure and ready to take over in case of a major failure or when a site goes down. In addition, ASR helps us save money on expensive hardware.

It has helped us to scale, no matter what Azure feature you use. Scalability is of the utmost importance.

Regarding improvements:

• MDM: Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Intune features are slowly moving over to Azure. I think as an integrated feature, there will be better ways to manage mobile devices.
• Azure backup: It is still hard to configure and to figure out which Azure backup component to use for backing up different data on various storages.

We have been using the solution for four years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The technical support is skilled.

Everything you do for the first time can be complex. Setting up a VM in Azure is straightforward, but setting up a Disaster Recovery plan or moving a complete infrastructure to Azure can be complex.

Most of the complexity has to do with initial lack of experience. Diving into the material, study and hard work together with colleagues helps a lot.

An experienced System Administrator with years of on-premise experience will be able to make the move to Azure.

As a consultant, I leave this area to my sales colleagues. When in doubt, contact Microsoft. They will be able to clarify your questions.

We are a Microsoft Gold Partner, so we only use MS products.

The ability to kick start a new web application or website and having them up and running in matter of minutes still amazes me.

Deploying new release for existing web applications has now become a matter of right clicking the name of the project and clicking ‘publish’, the same activity before might have been done in hours to days – depending on the complexity for the app.

Anything to do with referencing other packages is simply frustrating, this is mostly a problem with the Windows framework and not the hosting service, but it is still the most time consuming and irritating thing about using ASP.NET

Yes, well back in the days we used to install physical servers, then we went to manually virtual servers, that to hosted virtual server, then to Amazon machines and now switched to Windows Azure.

As simple as can be.

We do all technical work in house and with Azure there was really no need for external assistance.

When starting out I became member of the BizSpark program so the initial cost was 0 (FREE!), on customer’s projects the cost can go from $50 to $200 per month which is really cost effective for them.

Yes for every project we will compare Azure with Amazon, with virtual servers with a physical server. But in almost every case choosing Azure will be a no brainer.

We, as consultants of Azure, have used the SQL storage accounts, Databricks for computing models, and Data Factory for ETLs. 

The Azure Portal has an advantage in terms of UX making buying resources or downgrading is really easier to understand. AWS has micro, smaller functionalities whereas Azure has more end-to-end focus which makes it easier saving you time and money.

The integration pipeline could be a bit more broad in terms of applications.

Additionally, some companies require third parties to develop on their cloud. it would be interesting to see if it would be possible to provide another company with restricted access to their analytical tech stack.

I have used the solution for the past three years.

The solution is stable.

There is potential for scalability but that becomes more complex the more packaged the product is.

I have never used support personally but I have heard that it is good.

The initial setup was straightforward - one fifth of the work in comparison to AWS. It took about three months in total.