Microsoft Azure Reviews

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.

• VM Lab

• SQL

• BI

• Ran full power during working hours and when people are not working. The server should not be running, let them sleep. :)
• Eight working hours x 5 = 40 hours
• Twenty per cent of the server ran 24/7, but if there are ns users, then it should not run full force.

I would like to see a better understanding about business and compute. Basically, knowledge of your to burn your money efficiently.

We have used this solution for over four years.

There were issues with deployment.

There were issues with stability.

There were issues with scalability.

Customer service is very good. Microsoft Azure support can replace the second level support group. Be aware of it as they are very good at what they are doing.

I would give technical support a rating of 10/10.

We switched solutions due to cost.

It took less than three years for the ROI to be zero. Only experience is left. Over three years is better in-house for the ROI.

These elements are brilliant. It is a no brainer.

We evaluated Lab.

App Service is the most valuable feature because it is very simple to configure compared to the other services.

Almost all of our services to the customer are run on Azure such as the video.metricarts.com.

Viewing the expenses for each service in the Azure Portal is difficult for novices to understand; this could improve.

It's a great platform, but its visual interface is sometimes difficult to understand.

I have used this solution for four years.

Azure is very stable with its services, I have never had problems with its stability.

Most services allow you to scale easily, but you have to understand the necessary resources before scaling.

Technical support is good, they usually respond on the same day that one asks them a question. I would rate them a 9 out of 10.

I've always used Azure.

The setup isn't complex; on the contrary, in less than 15 minutes I was already using Azure.

Before using any of Azure's services, investigate their prices, and in some cases, use the free plans that are available.

I evaluated the Amazon AWS option, but the simplicity of creating services was better in Azure.

Understand the scope of each service and its limitations, to avoid problems after execution.

We use Azure for DevOps, to host numerous applications that are critical to our business, and we run our software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering exclusively from Azure.

Azure Active Directory: Has powerful security and auditing capabilities that we use to secure all our apps.

Azure File services – Comes in handy often when we need a staging place for content.

Block Blob storage – Reliable and low cost for long-term storage of important information.

Azure Regions – We leverage Azure regions around the world; we love the flexibility and ease at which we can deploy and manage resources for our global clients.

The Azure Billing API could be so much better. It only provides billing metrics for a set duration. For example, if you want to look at billing for a week /month/some other duration, then you have to make all the calls, store the data separately, and run your own computation to get the results that you need. Obviously, the billing system already has all of this data, so the API should just give you parameters to specify the billing duration and return the figures accordingly.

There were very minor issues related to billing. For example, sometimes under accounts with the Enterprise Agreements, we see that storage accounts are missing access to the activity costs.

There were no scalability issues experience this far.

The level of technical support is low.

In general, there is a small learning curve in regards to the public cloud concepts and the Azure user portal, but nothing terrible.

Be careful with Azure Cool storage accounts; if you are dealing with high object counts, then it can be more economical to use Hot storage because of the high storage access costs associated with Cool.

We considered the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), but decided to use Microsoft Azure for a few reasons.

First, we believe that Microsoft will emerge as the preferred public cloud provider for the enterprise-class workloads and scenarios. Second, for our development goals, we could not spread ourselves thin by supporting multiple public cloud providers. Another reason is that most of our clients are using Office 365 and are Microsoft Azure clients themselves. Thus, it is more efficient for our solution and for the work that we perform, to be local to their existing applications/data. Finally, Microsoft Stack is something that we are already familiar with, and Azure being Microsoft, we felt it matched best with our knowledge and expertise.

Make sure you understand the cloud’s pricing model. Depending on your scenario, i.e., in rare cases, it may be more economical to do things on-premises.

Regarding some of the SaaS offerings in Azure, again, understand the pricing because it might make sense to leverage what they have as a service. In some cases, you may want to build it and manage it yourself.

Also, pay attention to which Azure Region you spin up compute and storage because the pricing can vary between regions and not all the offerings are equal across the regions.

By migrating our infrastructure to Azure, we have been more agile on several fronts as an organization, from been able to create proof of concepts on the fly, to being able to make changes quickly and repeatedly.

• Compute (App service, and virtual machine scale sets): The ability to manage Windows and Linus virtual machines.

• Monitoring and Management: Ability to use log analytics to search, collect and visualize machine data from on-premises and cloud.

• Data Analytics: Security and Identity (Azure Active Directory): This feature adds multi-factor authentication, self-service password reset and group-based application access.

• Storage (Azure files): Still in preview at this stage, its allows the creating of SMB 2.1 shared folders on Azure storage service.

• Azure Site Recovery: Allows the replication and recovery of VMs hosted on Azure, thereby extending business values of almost any size.

• Networking (Azure ExpressRoute): This feature allows the connection of data center with Azure via private link that does not travel over the internet. Advantages include security, lower latency and higher reliability.

Every area of the product still needs to improve as it can always get better. Windows wasn't where it is today decades ago. There was a continuous improvement and evolutionary changes. Same is expected of Microsoft Azure.

Specifically, I would like to see better Azure Data Analytics and monitoring RF.

Azure is very stable with no issues at all.

The ability to scale easily is one of Microsoft Azure strength, one can start and scale up as traffic increase or as the business growth is required. So we didn't have issues with scalability.

The technical support is great.

We never used a different solution. We had a PoC with every vendor in the same competitive space and decided to go with the best.

The initial setup was very straightforward, as we knew what is required from the technical perspective and as a business. Which we specified in an architectural design before hand.

Make use of Azure pricing calculator and you will find out that Azure Is still more reasonable that the competition and do your research, when unclear speak with your MS support.

We evaluated some other competitive products and decided to go with Azure as its suit and meet our business requirement.

You need to have a clear vision of your business expectation from the product. Define your business requirements, objectives and ensure that your cloud provider can support those requirements.

Consider the cost, location, licensing, and technical capability to support and guide your 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.

Features such as Azure object storage, IaaS, Azure System Center, Azure SQL Database are valuable to me.

It provides:

• Scalable workload with elastic cloud capabilities

• Hybrid IT management of the on-premise and cloud workloads

• Disaster recovery

Azure is growing its open-source offerings and I see this as a continuous area of improvement.

I have used this solution for six years.

Early on, there were issues with the workload interruptions. Over the past 12 months, it has been a stable cloud service.

There were no issues with its scalability.

Technical support is one of Azure’s strengths, I would rate it above average to excellent.

I previously used Savvis and Verizon’s IaaS Enterprise Cloud solutions.

The initial setup was moderately complex. The use of PowerShell greatly increases the ability to fine-tune workloads, i.e., after the initial setup was completed.

If you have the existing on-premise licenses, make sure to ask for their special licensing promotions so as to allow consolidation of licenses and subscriptions, in order to maximize the current investment and control TCO.

We looked at other solutions such as AWS, Google's Cloud Platform and Terremark/Verizon.

Leverage their cloud credit program so as to allow your team to become acquainted with Azure, before turning on their cloud billing services.