Microsoft Azure Reviews

Building development and production environments to support business acrivity.

Getting resources up and running quickly and providing secure access to those resources makes life easier. Also, Microsoft Azure really does offer a great deal which allows one to completely think about software development in new ways. I love the WebApps feature and am currently learning everything I can about Logic apps.

I am really into the Everything as a Service model that Azure seems to be heading towards. Less fussing over VM's and Operating Systems.

The ability to quickly create and manage resources is critical to getting things done, Azure just makes getting things done a lot simpler.

You eventually end up with a large collection of 'bits' all working together, I find it hard to be able to create a logical 'box' and put all the 'bits' that need to be in that box / application into the one place.

We're still learning though, so odds are there's something that will help us with this already in Azure.

No, so far we've had no problems with anything we've deployed onto Microsoft Azure, rock solid.

At our early stage we've not encountered any scalability issues at all, and we're not likely to either, Azure will easily handle whatever workload we plan to throw at it.

Customer Service:

Excellent! I raised a support ticket on a question I had and got a prompt, clearly articulated and knowledgeable reply from the Microsoft Technical support person which addressed our question in a very short time-frame.

Technical Support:

Excellent! Was very impressed with the person I liaised with.

I was using an on-premises solution with servers running a HyperVisor, we were due to replace old hardware and needed to make resources available everywhere the team is, Microsoft Azure 'just made sense'.

Setting up was quite simple, before jumping in though make sure you watch some of the video's on the MVA site about virtual networking and so forth, the Azure user interface makes deploying these resources relatively straight-forward.

We went in-house, learning as we go. We're still very new to Azure and learning all the time, we'd be beginner to intermediate at most. We're not deploying to production for some time and will work with a Certified Microsoft Partner when we get to that stage.

Several thousand dollars and counting, we haven't needed to upgrade on premises hardware (In fact we eliminated all of the old on-premises hardware and run 100% on Azure) or pay for it's maintenance, power etc.

Understand and use the pricing calculator!

Learn PowerShell, a quick tip is that you can shut down and de-allocate your VM's when you are not using them, this way the VM's are not incurring charges. We absolutely love this feature, as it means that when the environment is not in use, it isn't costing much (if anything), so it lends itself to making the I.T environment more efficient.

We looked at AWS, but we chose Azure because we use a lot of Microsoft Products and it just felt more integrated.

Start with the simple things first, design your environment before deploying anything, even a simple development environment. Understand the charging model used and get to grips with the basics of PowerShell, as nice as the web based front end is, PowerShell is very handy.

• 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.

I do not use customer service.

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.

Provisioning, info bus, video streaming, IOT templates, Web Services, SQL

Azure has allowed our burgeoning PRC SOE clients to initiate international cloud launches of new IOT products.

Pricing of outgoing data has capped the ablity for startup products to justify the ROI of Azure application deployment.

3 years

Just cost

Over the last 12 months we've seen 2 outages.

No

Poor, you can't get to people who know the products when you are ramping up.

poor

Used AWS and FireHost but switched to support our partnering efforts with MSFT.

Straightforward

In-house

Not good because of out going data costs.

Push MSFT to change the outgoing data policy.

AWS, Huawei, FireHost

• Virtual Networking
• Security
• Feature packing
• Virtual Machines
• Ease of implementation
• Azure AD
• Azure AD Directory Domain Services
• Database as a Service
• Operations Management Suite
• RBAC

Mobility, no more "metal" on-premise, cloud-based directory with SSO features, sped implementing new solutions, reduced skillset for management and reporting.

We have a full Azure plus Office 365 implementation for servers and desktops, authenticating users on Azure AD over 802.1X switching and wireless. No on-premise servers, DC's, file-servers, etc.

Stability. Microsoft is implementing changes too fast and sometimes things break.

Three years, but the full stack only since January 2017.

None.

Yes. Beware of August. Microsoft makes some big changes during this month and they have an impact on customers.

None.

10 out of 10.

10 out of 10.

On-premise traditional solutions.

Complex in the beginning, because the company I was migrating had some peculiarities.

The latter move was totally stable as we did a cutoff migration and no garbage was imported. Some downtime was expected, but this was minimal.

In-house, with support from a vendor team. Excellent support: 10 out of 10.

Not yet calculated since it was a major digital transformation and an ongoing project.

Setup cost is low and Microsoft may help your project financially with services from a partner.

Be sure to know your licensing or ask for advice. It's worth it. You may be led into something you don't need, if following Microsoft or a vendor.

No.

Evaluate extensibly (the actual scenario), have a definitive vision of where you want to be in a near future, align the strategy with your management and expect that it may not be cheaper. A correct vision of a project of this kind cannot be focused on lowering costs but vision alignment, future scalability, speed on delivering services, and maintaining smaller IT crews focused on business needs.

Please do some previous math regarding actual licensing versus a costs model. Extrapolate this to a five year plan to match current hardware lifespans.

Web Apps and Functions. I had been able to reduce my costs a lot by using Functions, it allowed me to change the way we are developing solutions and reduce the time to market. Highly recommended.

Our development team uses Visual Studio to develop the solutions we work with. By using Functions, we can be more agile on the development and sometimes our developers just go online and update the code without even needing to have their computer with them.

Sometimes technical support is not fast as I needed on the first call, but once they are engaged, it is really easy to get an answer.

Five years.

No.

No, it works perfectly.

Sometimes it is not fast as I needed on the first call, but once they are engaged, it is really easy to get an answer.

No.

Really straightforward. We didn’t need to learn anything different.

Try to go for an Enterprise agreement if you have a contract with Microsoft. If you are running virtual machines, go for the CPP Microsoft Compute Pre-Purchase Plan.

Yes, AWS.

Try to go for serverless solutions or Functions to increase availability and reduce costs.

All development and pre-production scenarios are now under pay as you go, and are not open all the time, in that way we’re saving a lot of resources, money and we gain fast flexibility to grant new capabilities, computing power, and PoC scenarios.

All of this without compromising production workloads and overall computing power, and any investment.

Software designed network capabilities, flexible computing, and managed storage. All of them together make a hybrid datacenter design more flexible for users and IT pros.

SDN capabilities make anyone able to manage and organize a virtualized network in as many levels (VNets and subnets) as you want, securing aces as well. You can organize many VNets and easily interconnect them. You have several and easy ways to connect your virtual DC in Azure with your on-premise DC -- making it easy to have hybrid environments.

Managed storage capabilities, which create a very simple way to create, copy, and replicate local or geo-replicate, it's very simple to assign workloads.

All classic storage configuration settings are now managed by the platform. Huge granularity of compute availability makes it really easy to get appropriate sizing or to change the sizing of actual or future workloads.

One of the most important areas for improvement is the administrative part of management. It‘s difficult to manage, all aspects of Azure invoicing, and further pricing vs usage comparison and capacity to move under usage resources to a better positioned.

In this matter, it’s necessary to use third party products or to use good self-management economic tools

Sometimes in the management portal, not in the workloads.

Not at the current situation. Not all workloads are working in Azure.

In our case, tech support was requested only two times, regarding Azure AD integration issues and special domain resolution issues. It was solved in a good way.

I want to mention a special domain resolution case. It was not easy to solve and was difficult to find a escalation engineer in order to understand the “problem” to fix it.

Because of better integration with AD and Azure AD, Office 365, and IaaS and PaaS Services.

In general, it was straightforward, but was really well analyzed and planned in order to minimize possible problems and complexity.

It’s a good idea to use BYOL if you have an EA. It’s a really noticeable cost reduction.

It’s also interesting to analyze carefully all invoicing costs and workload usages -- to better fit costing scenarios.

Yes, we analyzed Amazon AWS and Oracle Cloud.

Be careful, not all workloads are interesting or cost viability to move to Azure as is. In most cases, it will be necessary an important transformation to better fit the Azure ecosystem.

Focus on a first project in order to test all aspects related with platform, providers, own tech capabilities, costs -- that will give you all the tools to decide future plans.

Virtual machines, Azure Web Applications, MS SQL DB, DNS, Azure Active Directory, etc. are some of the most valuable features.

It is quite easy to learn to start working with them and they are composite enough to use them in many different scenarios.

For example, you can create a web app with a few clicks from Visual Studio and publish it to Azure Web Apps. You also can integrate that Web App to CI/CD pipeline (https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/build/get-started/aspnet-4-ci-cd-azure-automatic), assign custom SSL certificates to it (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service-web/app-service-web-tutorial-custom-SSL), configure auto-scale (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/app-service-environment-auto-scale), implement Azure AD authentication (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service-mobile/app-service-mobile-how-to-configure-active-directory-authentication?toc=%2fazure%2fapp-service%2ftoc.json), etc.

It enabled moving from the virtual machines to the Web Application-side, which in turn saved a lot of time for our developers.

I have used this solution for about two years.

There were some stability issues. Some of them were user-specific (some applications were buggy), while some were global https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/history/.

There were no scalability issues. My work duties are not connected to this feature.

On a scale from 1-10 (1=worst, 10=best). I would rate the technical support a seven out of 10. First level support is awful (it works only if you have a generic issue). But if you are lucky enough, you could get a real technical person, who could help you.

The setup/installation depends from which service you start (for example, start to use DNS which is much easier vs the web applications).

If your company is big enough and oriented to the cloud, then go for the Enterprise Agreement. If you want just to try it first, then use the trial version.

Learn the fundamentals using the official documentation; for example, you have the Developer Guide and courses.

Start using new services based on the scenarios described in the official documentation.

Use communities for consulting, such as Stack Overflow, Reddit, and Slack. However, personally, I prefer the channel azured.slack.com.