Microsoft Azure Reviews

Currently we are hosting custom web applications, boxed applications, Azure VMs, Azure files for shared company files, Azure blob storage, Azure Active Directory with Active Directory sync, Single Sign On, and development and testing purposes.

Creating VMs for development has been huge since we ran out of resources locally. Creating Hybrid solutions provides us with greater confidence in higher availability. Storage has made remote access to files much more painless and easy. Using SSO has also been great reducing the number of passwords and locations required to use them.

Customized Dashboard, Site-to-site and point-to-Site VPN, Virtual Machines, Web Apps, SQL, SharePoint, Storage, Test/Dev environments.

Pricing is very difficult to guesstimate. With so many a la carte options and individual pricing it can be a hassle to understand. I constantly need to go over the report to find out where I can save money and what is eating up the monthly costs.

No issues with stability. Has been rock solid.

Scalability is Microsofts big advantage. At anytime you can scale up or down your servers or services growing them or shrinking them to your needs. You can even automate this process. I personally do not get into Enterprise solutions but they continue to add larger solutions frequently.  

Customer Service:

First response is 2-4 hours. Staff is knowledgeable but can often be difficult to understand and slow. Although I do not call about routine issues and bring very complex problems there way. With that said I will say every issue does get resolved.

Technical Support:

I rate technical support 7/10. First response is 2-4 hours. Staff is knowledgeable but can often be difficult to understand. I have also found that a few of them try to e-mail you despite your request for a call. This causes much miscommunication and additional time your problem is not getting resolved.

I only give them an 7 because I have struggled a time or two with understanding their English or getting the ball rolling resolving my issue. This all really depends on the department you need.

I will say that they always get the issue resolved regardless of the complexity of the problem.

No I have not, but we chose Azure simply simply because we are Microsoft partners and get free Azure credits to work with.  Microsoft is also a power player in cloud solution and a trusted name.  

Huge learning curve for me. I found just diving in was incredibly difficult. Much lab time required to understand how things work together. Once you get going however it all makes sense.

I also find the GUI to be more intuitive then AWS and feels better.

They are constantly changing the GUI while they continue migrating the ASM model to the ARM model. Since this is a living platform it can change from one day to the next adding features. 

I implemented all the solutions myself with a little research.

Microsoft does have special pricing for Development purposes. This does help reduce the monthly costs for our team.

As our local resources reach their end of life, we have moved servers and services to Azure.  It becomes more of an operation expense as apposed to a capitol expense. 

We are MS partners. Depending on your partnership you may or may not get Visual Studio Enterprises licenses. Each license allows you to get a $150 Azure credit per month.

This has been great for our developers and I to put in to practice some Azure solutions.

There are many other free credits available as well.  Do some searching.

If you need to purchase Azure they do have a pricing calculator that may help you determine costs.  https://azure.microsoft.com/en...

I know AWS is another great solution, but have not tackled it yet. I do have plans to experiment with Amazons solution to determine for my own the differences. 

The biggest advantage to using Azure over any other cloud solution is the ability to move your domain into the cloud and be completely server free and still have domain services.

I have also found that site-to-site vpn with domain services rack up a good percentage of our monthly costs. These are the fundamentals to move your network into Azure.

We have been using Azure for DevOps and non-production environments. It is great when you want to deploy apps in your staging environment first using deployment slots. This allows you to flick the switch very quickly between your current prod app and the newly developed in staging to see how it behaves in the real world. If something goes wrong, you can easily switch it back.

Azure is a platform which allows our organization to be agile. It very quickly provisions servers, infrastructure, and apps on the fly and complies with security requirements and data safety.

Azure Active Directory, Azure VMs, Azure network security groups (NSG), and  monitoring endpoints across different regions to check how your platform operates from different geographic locations. Azure backups are another feature which are quite useful, especially since they allow us to backup our Azure VMs and our on-premise servers. Data can be backed up to Azure, saving time, space, and using clunky tapes to restore data, when needed.

Azure ARM console can be a bit overwhelming at the beginning. 

If you are not aware of costs, pricing, etc., you can end up with a hefty bill. However, I found that the Azure price calculator is a valuable tool to use before starting to deploy VMs in Azure. This tool will give you an overview of the costs you should expect on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis.

I have had no stability issues. It is a very stable platform and very resilient. It comes down how you set up your geo-redundant options for backups, SQL replication. and VMs which run your services/apps.

I have had no scalability issues. It is an elastic platform. It all depends how you set up your scale up options to address heavy loads, but the options are there for you to use.

Microsoft Premier support is great to deal with. They understand very quickly the scenarios and how critical a scenario can be. They provide info, support, and knowledge to address issues. 

We did not have a particular issue when implementing. It was mostly understanding all the options Azure had. We used Premier support to generate inquiries with Microsoft seeking clarification about what option was best suited for what we wanted to do.

I used AWS (Amazon Web Services), but mostly because I was involved in a project. AWS is also a great solution, but I found Azure was easier to use and it had a native integration with my current platform (Windows).

The key here is design. You need to design and orchestrate how you want your VMs (geo-redundant, in an availability set, size of VMs, etc.). It is the key to understanding the costs of each set of VMs available to you in terms of size and computing resources. Also, understand what type of storage will be required for you to deploy your virtual infrastructure SSD storage and larger disks. Plan to use this (Standard, Basic, or Premium) and it needs to be taken into consideration depending of what you want to use Azure for.

In-house deployment, as there were Azure skills on the team.

Not applicable.

Use Azure price calculator before embarking on an Azure deployment. This will help you understand straight away what your cost expectations are on a regular basis. You can always run Azure on a 30 day trial, see how you feel about it, then make the decision to switch to the full Azure usage.

In addition to AWS, I also trialed Oracle Cloud (on a smaller scale) and it is great if you are running Oracle Databases. You can also stand up your VMs and build your environment. A cool feature of Oracle Cloud is you can run a private cloud version in your data center, exactly the same experience if you are running it on a private or public cloud. The private cloud solution comes in the form of an Oracle appliance which gets configured, deployed and installed by Oracle directly in your data center.

Run Azure on a 30 day trial and see how you feel about it, then make the decision to switch to the full Azure usage. You see the reason when you view the benefits of using its cloud solution, especially one that integrates so seamlessly with your environment, collaboration tools, and apps.

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.