Azure Stack Reviews

Our company uses the solution to host and run an application in the cloud. We have 25,000 customers who use our application. 

The solution pairs well with other MS services and saves us a lot of money. 

Overall support needs improvement because they are not agile across services. 

I have been using the solution for three years. 

The solution is stable. 

The word scalability is a misnomer. It is generally said that the cloud has unlimited scalability but that is where we face challenges. When we try to scale the system from one plan to another, our DevOps engineer reports that the system is failing. We have reached out to Microsoft but they have been unable to solve our specific issue so scalability is challenging. 

We had issues scaling from one plan to another and reached out to support. Technical support is not agile across services and has been unable to solve our issue.

Support is rated a five out of ten. 

Neutral

The setup is easy with no challenges but upgrades are complex. We have experienced challenges when upgrading components from one plan to another plan. Setup does not have these challenges. 

We implemented the solution in-house. We slowly started utilizing services but total deployment did not take much time. 

Ongoing maintenance is not a challenge. 

So far, we have not measured ROI.

The solution saves us money but is more costly than other products such as AWS. We have been paying 10 crores for our Azure services. 

We are thinking of moving from Azure to AWS because there are issues scaling the suite of products, support is not optimum, and the solution is more costly than AWS products. 

Before choosing the solution or AWS, it is important to reach out to relevant engagement or sales teams to get product clarity. 

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

We are using it in our company and the customer's company as well. So, it works on both sides. For certain development environments, we need to build our internal environment, and we need it for that. Similarly, we need to build the production environment for the customer, and we use it for that.

The beauty of Azure is that most of the features are easily accessible. It is user-friendly. Almost all resources in Azure are very easily accessible. For example, you can access a virtual machine, and you can scale it up. You can go ahead with different infrastructure-as-a-service in Azure for the platform or for the cloud. Different levels of development could be done using it.

It should be improved in terms of integrations. It could be integrated more with external tools. 

We have Azure Purview for governance, but that is for data governance. For code governance, we have to use SonarQube or WhiteSource for vulnerabilities and license management. We would like to have a native code compliance tool.

I have been working with this solution for three years. 

It is absolutely stable.

It is scalable. The resources in Azure are scalable for a smooth transaction. 

Their technical support is very good. They are always easily available when we need them.

Positive

I have been working with different automation tools such as Jenkins. Jenkins is a good tool to start with. Being a DevOps person, I had to go with Azure ADO and Azure DevOps, which basically gives you the view of how DevOps actually works.

It is easy to set up. It takes you minutes to set it up.

Azure has a subscription version. It has a pay-as-you-go subscription with a subscription ID. So, you have your particular subscription with an enterprise agreement. There is a dev-type subscription for development and testing.

The pricing seems pretty reasonable. The pricing could be per resource. For example, you have Databricks, Data Factory, Scaled DB, and Cosmos. You have everything in Azure. They have an Azure pricing calculator that you can use to check the price of every resource. It gives you a proper cost estimation. You can compare the cost and then go for the best resource for your project.

I would definitely advise others to implement it as an infrastructure service only because you get to learn more. You get to explore the code more and know different steps. You can automate more and better. You can get automation done on top of what is already there, which could lead to another invention. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We primarily utilize Azure Stack for hybrid cloud deployments, mainly for scaling up compute resources quickly when needed. This involves spinning up instances on the public cloud, specifically Azure, to manage workloads distributed across on-premises and the public cloud. Additionally, we employ Azure Stack for certain floor-based or edge computing solutions, particularly in locations such as factories, to store, maintain, and support specific operations.

Azure Stack serves a crucial role in our hybrid cloud strategy because we can't place all our data in the public cloud for various reasons. One key use case for Azure Stack is data localization, especially in countries like Australia and Denmark where strict data regulations are in place. For applications and data that cannot leave the country, we rely on Azure Stack to maintain and manage them locally. Meanwhile, for other workloads, we leverage the public cloud, predominantly Azure, to meet our requirements.

One of the features I really appreciate is the Hybrid Cloud Extension UI. It simplifies the management of workloads across on-premises, public cloud, and edge locations through a single interface. This functionality streamlines the management process for me. Another aspect I find valuable is the consistency Azure Stack offers. It provides a uniform experience, from service names to user interface, whether I'm working in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge. This consistency is crucial in managing various deployment scenarios. Lastly, Azure Stack's ability to function in isolated or remote areas, such as factory and plant locations with limited network connectivity, is highly valuable. This synced operation capability ensures smooth operations even in challenging environments.

One aspect that I consider a drawback is the cost associated with Azure Stack, as its deployment expenses tend to be on the higher side compared to other solutions. Another significant challenge is integration, especially with third-party products. While Azure Stack seamlessly integrates with Microsoft's own tools and platforms, there is room for improvement in its compatibility with third-party solutions. Lastly, although updating and patching Azure Stack is more straightforward than in older Windows versions, there is still room for enhancement in the upgrade and patch management process.

I have been using the solution for more than 18 months.

It is definitely stable and I would rate it nine or eight out of ten.

It's a bit complex to scale and I would rate it a seven out of ten.

The customer service is good. 

Positive

The reason we lean towards Azure Stack over competitors is that it offers strong integration with the public cloud, specifically Azure. Many of our clients use Microsoft 365, and this leads to a significant presence of Azure workloads. Additionally, a substantial portion of our servers run on Windows. These factors make Azure Stack a favorable choice for us. When comparing it to Nutanix, Azure Stack stands out in terms of its integration with the public cloud and, in some cases, cost-effectiveness.

The initial setup is moderate, not extremely simple but not very complex. It is hybrid but depends on the requirements of the client. The percentage of workloads on Azure Stack varies across our customers, ranging from ten percent to sixty percent. We opt for Azure Stack as a hybrid solution when a customer has some workloads on the public cloud. Typically, we set up Azure Stack in an on-premises data center and migrate workloads from existing environments, such as VMware or Hyper-V, to Azure Stack. 

However, if the workloads are primarily for the public cloud, we migrate them directly to the public cloud. The choice between Azure Stack and public cloud migration depends on various factors, including connectivity, compliance, costs, and other specific requirements. In essence, our Azure Stack environments are hybrid, with around thirty to forty percent of workloads residing on-premises and the remaining fifty to sixty percent in the public cloud.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

The pricing falls in the middle. It serves as a mediator between being expensive and being affordable, but it's not exactly cheap either. I would rate it a six out of ten.

I would overall rate it an eight out of ten. 

We have a client using Azure Exchange for their organization, including emails and Outlook. This is the most recent use case. 

And another client has a lot of cloud migrations at the moment. Some are from the Azure Stack to the Oracle Cloud, and others from the Alibaba Cloud to the Azure Stack. There are different projects ongoing at the moment, which are mostly targeted over the migration of the cloud to and from Azure and onwards.

The benefit for any company using Azure Stack or any of the cloud, even AWS, is that everything is managed by the service provider - in this case, Microsoft.

Azure, normally it's not an on-prem; it's the Microsoft cloud mostly based in California or in the Middle East, depending on the different geolocations of the cloud.

Microsoft has one data center in the Middle East, and most of the time, most of the local services for the Azure Stack are hosted from this location. Otherwise, it's mostly coming from Europe.

There are lots of great features.

The Office 365 migration from old accounts to new accounts is great. It is helpful for organizations, actually. If a user wants to upgrade Office 365 from any of the packages, there is no disruption happening during migration, and the data is kept safe. There's no loss of data. Previously, data loss was always a concern. 

Basically, the most beneficial feature I found in Azure is that any migration ensures data is always safe and secure.

It's easy to set up.

Improvement is already happening based on the strategy of Microsoft. 

Normally, in many countries, especially in the Middle East, there are government regulations for information technology itself. If government organizations want to host the cloud, they cannot take it from Microsoft directly; they must go through the local internet service providers, ISPs, or cloud solution providers locally. They should have a local data center in the Middle East, and the data should not move out of the Middle East. This is one of the restrictions we face.

Having said that, Microsoft is working with the governments in the Middle East. 

At the end of the day, it's all about the composition between the cloud service provider giants, including Microsoft. There is a growing market for Alibaba Cloud in the Middle East. It's growing more popular compared to Azure. The reason is that the governments are more focused on Chinese technology rather than Microsoft in certain areas.

I've used the solution for the past five years. 

The solution is extremely stable. 

It's extremely stable unless and until someone from the operations team messes with it.

In a heavy-load cloud environment, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Microsoft data centers are tier-four data centers. Tier four is a certification from the Uptime Institute, which makes sure that the data center standards are being met in regard to the end customer service availability. Tier four has the highest rating, which is the 99.49% of service availability. This means that if anything goes wrong at the data center in the Microsoft infrastructure, they have a failover backup so that the customer wouldn't even feel that the service is down and there would be not any interruption for the end customer.

The solution is extremely scalable. The cloud is based on the concept of scalability. If the cloud is not scalable, there's no need even to call it a cloud.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten in terms of scalability. 

On one of our deployments, the number of users is between 300 and 500. Our deployments vary in size. That includes the Azure Exchange only. There are other parts running on the Azure Stack.

The solution is suitable for all sizes of businesses. If they are looking for a solution that is flexible and scalable, this is a good option. It would be good, for example, for a logistics company where the Stack is mission-critical. 

If something goes down, switching operations happen in milliseconds or microseconds, maybe. Therefore, even if the virtual machine is down, the end user, the logistics service, will not be interrupted.

Technical support is good. Normally, whatever the Azure Stack case is, we open up a ticket. It's a system in Microsoft. The call agent will open a ticket for specific troubleshooting, and it'll remain open until the issue is resolved. They have an SLA for that specific reason.

The technical support rating on the consumer level with Microsoft is very generic, as per my experience. Normally they keep on looping stuff instead of resolving the issues. For the business customer, it's different since it's a business; it's a matter of money. In that regard, their service is quite good, actually. 

However, on the consumer side, when I worked with Outlook or Azure, there was an Azure resource for which the issue came up. I checked with my operations team and they said the issue was from Microsoft and we had to open a ticket with them. I opened a ticket, and it took one or two days, and it kept on looping, and eventually, we solved the problem by ourselves.

There's a cloud called Virtual Stream, which was acquired by Dell EMC. Dell EMC was our partner. 

We had a Virtual Stream Cloud for mobile that we were providing to our business customers in the different big companies. In the end, we sold the cloud. It was a bit complex compared to other cloud technologies. That said, it was quite reliable, actually.

The initial setup depends on the situation. Typically, it is simple. Suppose you're buying and provisioning Azure Cloud sources from the Microsoft website and have the online payment through Mastercard. In that case, you can build up your own customized cloud through the Microsoft website, and they will provision your cloud for you, and it'll be ready within a few minutes or hours, depending on the requirement. 

In some cases, it depends on the customer's solution and what our customer is looking for. Sometimes, there are some compatibility feature sets from other service providers that have to be deployed in the Azure Cloud, and how much time Azure Cloud would take to complete its provisioning. 

It is simple if you need one virtual machine or block storage from Azure, and you need to have the Windows operating system and the RAM or memory you require. It's one click away and done within a few seconds.

However, if you are building up a solution for some product that requires, for example, 300 virtual machines and there are a lot of resources that involve some third-party SaaS, this might take some time. 

Overall, it is straightforward, and I'd rate the implementation process eight out of ten. With cloud service providers, many things are automated, and everything is happening virtually. That relieves a lot of the complexity. Anyone who understands cloud technology should have very many issues. 

We have ten to 15 people who can handle deployment and maintenance tasks.

We have a team that deploys the solution. Sometimes I'm enrolled with the team, sometimes, the team handles things alone. It's an operation team for the customer, and we usually provide them with managed services for their cloud, where we do all the technical operations on the cloud by ourselves. We implement it according to the client's authorization.

The licensing model is different in different regions. For the Middle East, it's different than it is for China, for example. Once you go to the Azure website and you want to have the Azure Stack resources provisioned, they let you look at the different regions, and the pricing for different resources, for the block storage, computing, virtual machines, memory, et cetera. All the pricing scenario is in US dollars since they're selling it internationally. 

While it's different in different regions, it's quite affordable compared to other products.

Similar competitors, like Alibaba and Amazon, have a similar pricing strategy. They also offer regional-based pricing once you are assuring the cloud resources on their platforms. It's flexible pricing for Azure. That said, in most cases, I see that Azure is a bit high compared to Alibaba or Amazon.

Most small and medium-sized customers are budget-conscious. If they want to have Azure, they might think, "Okay, it's better to move to Amazon, or to Alibaba, or to some other cloud since the price difference is quite high when looking at Azure Stack."

We have a partnership with Microsoft.

We are likely using the latest version of the solution. Typically, we get scheduled updates from the cloud. 

As far as my experience is concerned, Azure is a very flexible and very stable solution. If you want quality and stability, you should move to the Azure Stack.

Of course, everything depends on the customer's requirements and what exactly he is looking for in the Azure Stack. Not all customers will use the full Azure Stack. Most likely, they will have third-party applications based on their current infrastructure, which they will want to deploy in the Azure Stack. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten overall. Amazon has more market share than Azure. Alibaba is beginning to challenge both.

So we have offered Azure Stack to one of the biggest telco companies here in the Philippines. We have two sites there, and so far, their business has been growing good. They want to deploy more sites here in the Philippines using Azure Stack.

The most valuable features are related to managing Kubernetes cluster nodes.

When it comes to room for improvement, there should be more focus on the user interface, specifically for the management console.

In the future release, I would like to see better UI. 

I have actually been with HPE for five years now, and we have been a partner of Microsoft Azure's teams even before I joined. So I would say five years.

We always use the latest version. The latest is HCI version 21H2.

It is very stable. I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. Our clients are enterprise businesses. And I think they've been using it for about four years now.

Sometimes there have been software issues, but customers still need assistance from us, the hardware vendor. So I think the ticketing and issue logging need to be more available.

Positive

I would rate the initial setup a seven, where one is difficult, and ten is easy. The deployment took around two to three months. 

If we compare it in the market to other vendors, I think it would be around four out of ten, where one is low, and ten is high. There is additional fees required for support. 

I have conducted cost analysis and simulations using AWS, Azure Stack, and Google Cloud. So I've performed several cost analyses based on customer requirements. But I haven't had extensive hands-on experience with those public clouds.

Overall, I would rate the product a nine out of ten because Azure Stack is very reliable. It's highly available and provides the requirements needed by the customers' applications. It's also very secure.

Azure Data Factory is a great solution for orchestration. 

From a security perspective, there are certain things which could be improved. We have that option of enabling the datacenter which sits on the Azure site. The solution is difficult to manage if this particular feature is disabled. 

I've been working with Azure Stack for nine to 10 years for me.

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The initial setup is straightforward if you are familiar with some of the architecture. The complexity may increase if you have a large amount of data that needs to be migrated. 

Azure is reasonably priced compared to Google Cloud, AWS, or some other cloud giants.

You need to focus on what your end goal to achieve and build the system in a way that makes it easy to maintain from a software, perspective, and platform perspective.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

The solution is cheap and helps consolidate infrastructure to a converged space compatible with medium customers. 

Azure Stack needs to improve integrations. 

I have been working with the solution for three to four months. 

I rate the tool's stability an eight out of ten. 

I rate Azure Stack's deployment a ten out of ten. My company has one customer for the solution. 

I rate the product's deployment a six out of ten. It took about a month's time to complete. 

I rate the tool's pricing a seven out of ten. 

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

Our company's customers consume the products installed from Azure Stack, so that is the usage of Azure Stack for our company. Speaking about Azure Stack from a financial perspective, if I have to talk about ERR, it is approximately 4,000 USD per month.

The most valuable features of the solution are related to anything and everything in data and analytics, including data management and Azure ML.

I think the monitoring and operational part, including more administration, must be simplified to simplify user adoption. The challenge in Azure Stack begins at an individual level when you try to monitor every service from Azure Stack that gets consumed. The more the configuration capacity is available in Azure Stack, the more configurable it becomes while becoming easier at a user level and administrator level, thereby helping to optimize the consumption cost.

With the road map of Azure Stack, I have, everything looks great. Looking at the way Azure Stack has matured in the market, I feel that the roadmap of Azure Stack is planned pretty well by Azure's product managers.

I have experience with Azure Stack for three to four years.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Considering the administration part and scope for improvement, I rate the solution's scalability an eight out of ten since it needs improvement at a user level and administration level regarding its consumption. The administrator does have all the rights, but then there should be some level of configuration needed if you go at an application level or at a service level where a user is using native capabilities of Azure should have an option for the administrator to extend it to the end user also.

There are around 15 users of Azure Stack in my company.

I do contact the solution's technical support when the need for it arises. The solution's technical support is great since, in our company, we get answers to most of our questions, and most of our queries get resolved with the help of the documentation itself. At least at our company's end, based on the services we are working on, we are less likely to depend on the solution's technical support.

The initial setup of Azure Stack is simple.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

Azure Stack is a medium-priced product, so it is not overpriced, but the prices may be higher for certain services.

Based on the secondary data or information we got in our company based on the initial evaluation we did, I think the way the instances are spread and made available across the globe makes Azure Stack a relatively easier product compared to its competitors. Azure Stack becomes easier to adopt with the new GDPR and the country-level data privacy or security rules implemented.

I recommend Azure Stack to those planning to use it. Most of our company's customers who use Azure Stack are happy.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.