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.

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.

Everything we have is hosted on Azure, include our email, as well as applications that we use like SharePoint and Office 365.

The most valuable feature is the single sign-on with multifactor authentication. Our staff uses an accounting system, they visit different bank sites, and the sales team uses Salesforce We want to be able to access all of these things with a single sign-on. In total, there are more than 50 sites. We are still evaluating this and it is not in production, yet.

The cost of Microsoft Azure could be lowered.

The subscription licensing is very complex and we would like to have it simplified.

The ease of configuration and use should be improved.

We have been using Azure for about four years.

Azure is quite stable.

I would say that this solution is scalable.

Technical support for Exchange and Sharepoint is quite good. Their response time is really good.

The initial setup is not complex.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

Our first deployment was CRM Dynamics, and it was done in the same way that we launched the previous version. However, it was easier than the last migration because the ease of preparing new machines with the wizard contributed to the quick implementation. It also includes great hardware specifications such as SSD Premium, which wasn't there until last year.

Azure has helped in the setup of operations with minimal environments for developing a proof of concept. The POC is the most useful and charming feature to get a minimal valuable product for all deployments. Customer satisfaction did increase the performance of sales, meanwhile, customer requirements were optimized.

This solution has an easy and (almost) intuitive administration interface to set up and deploy elements.

The incorporation of several kinds of storage, such as SSD Premium, enhanced the performance of machines.

The Machine Learning library for remote calls using REST and SOAP, as well as the legacy integrations of hybrid clouds are useful.

Virtual services might be improved by adding more rules for the validation of protocols and peripheral elements in security assurance. This feature could help to gain more visibility in compliance validation using cross-referencing between firewalls and legacy systems. By example, only mobile devices with Windows at phone, laptops, or tablets running either Windows 10 or Windows Mobile can print using Windows Server Hybrid Cloud Print, and this possibility cannot apply to another devices due to the feature uses an UNC path. UNC means for Universal Naming Convention, a standard for identifying servers, printers and other resources in a network. The UNC uses double slashes or backslashes to precede the name of the computer.

I was using hybrid solutions with several web hosting services, but several customers could not be accommodated. They needed to solve the problem of migrating huge data centers with confidential information, and the initial costs of proof of concepts were complicated if the isolation of every component relied on legacy systems.

We evaluated HostGator VPS before choosing this solution.

We use Azure as an infrastructure service. Most of our customers have web servers but we also manage Azure for SAP R/3. It works fine. They do have a lot of options for SAP All-In-One, but we don't have as many options for SAP Business One. What Azure offers for Business One customers is too short to have enough servers certified. It works fine but it's not a complete solution for customers that use SAP Business One.

Azure has improved my organization because it is a new technology and so the customers who don't have enough knowledge about the cloud delegate the administration of their cloud infrastructure to us. We incorporate and add a new service to our product lineup about how to manage their Azure. It impacts our business because we're able to incorporate this new service.

The Pricing Calculator would be the most valuable feature. It's easy to use. 

I would like to have more certified servers for SAP. Our customers need an easier interface to manage Azure. They don't have people who have cloud knowledge. The knowledge group is taking time and they use our services to manage the cloud data. Azure is built for auto services but it's not easy. The interface is not easy to use. I'd like to see them develop a better interface and more graphical information about the resource and the consumer.

There's a machine, the server. The smallest machine that they have has 112 GB of RAM. It is big for a customer. It has around 16 cores and a 112 GB of RAM. Amazon has a server with around 8 cores and 60 GB of RAM. The smallest certified machine for SAP Business One HANA in Amazon Web Services is 8 cores and 60 GB of RAM and Microsoft it's 16 and 112 GB of RAM. It's too big for a small customer. Because this machine is able to manage 50 concurrent users it's too big for a customer with 22 or 30 users. 

Until now I have only had a few problems with stability. There was a problem with Azure Active Directory in the US central region that affected almost all of the data centers around two or three months ago but otherwise, it's good stability. The stability is good enough.

Scalability is fine. We tried to create services in the data center in Brazil and there was not enough space. There were not enough cores and RAM so we were not able to create it. We opened a ticket with technical service and they told to use another region.

We chose Azure because of its scalability. With Azure, we are able to use the size of a machine that we need.

I haven't opened any tickets with technical support. The technical team opened most tickets but from what I hear, technical support has been fine. It could be better. They could improve the time it takes to respond but I have never heard about any issues from the technical guys about their support. They would prefer to get a faster response back because when you have a problem, you have your boss asking for updates so you need a fast answer.

It's a very expensive machine and I would like for them to improve the price. There are smaller sized competitors who offer cheaper prices. 

We didn't look at any other options because we are not business partners with other cloud solutions or providers. We only have Azure so we try to solve everything with Azure. If a customer asks us for a proposal to move or create some interesting tool in the cloud, we all use Azure. We never compared it to other cloud providers.

I would rate this solution a nine because they are always incorporating new alerts and new features. I wouldn't give it a ten because it's sometimes not easy to use and the price is not a fair price for the solution.

I don't know why customers think that Amazon is the best. I think that the customer thinks that the best option for cloud is an Amazon service and the second one is Microsoft. My advice to someone considering this or a similar solution is to be careful with Amazon because the customers think that they are always on the list.

Working Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to create a Kubernetes cluster. 

We are maintaining two environments of Kubernetes cluster on Azure using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

We have used other managed PaaS services like ACS, Database, and monitoring, integrated with Jenkins for continuous integration and continuous deployment. 

We are running our product which is deployed on Azure AKS cluster. This really helps us to drive more business from customers.

• It's very easy to create a Kubernetes cluster with the Azure Console 
• Able to connect to the cluster using Azure PowerShell
• Able to connect to the cluster using kubectl
• Very good help from Microsoft Knowledge Base and also from the community
• Very good support from the Microsoft team
• Easy to manage as the core part is handled by Microsoft
• Easy to add/scale up the cluster with more nodes by using the Azure console window or through scripting
• Can integrate plugins with Jenkins for auto deployment
• Integrated with a lot of open source tools for easy deployments and other functionalities like logging, monitoring, etc.

Better logging part when deployments are crashed, even when the entire cluster is crashed.

Should always go with recommendations provided by Microsoft during the creation of new clusters. Otherwise, stability is an issue.

Scalability is very good.

Technical support is excellent. Recently, we have encountered a few issues however, the customer support team helped us very quickly to come out of it.

We did not previously use a different solution. Kubernetes is the one we are using for container orchestration through Azure-managed Kubernetes service.

The initial setup is very easy; straightforward.