Microsoft Azure Reviews

The availability of the humongous amount of features and solutions in Azure are most valuable to us.

The continuous improvement of Microsoft is amazing. The agility and speed at which Microsoft is doing all this is really amazing.

The improvements are more on the partner's part than on the product's part. It is difficult to keep up with the continuous improvements that Microsoft is doing.

Issues were seen in the size and unclear configuration settings. If the bandwidth is limited, it can be an issue when migrating from on-prem to off-prem.

We have implemented this for our customers since the very beginning.

This depends on the support contract which you subscribe to. The free support is bad, but the paid versions have better support, i.e., more you pay, the better the support.

The other solutions that we had used before were on-premise solutions. We saw a major shift of the resources towards Microsoft Azure.

The setup was straightforward; with the help of TechNet, if there were any issues then they were easily solvable.

In regards to the pricing and licensing, you need to be aware of what to do. If it fits in your current licensing contract, add it to that contract. If not, then depending on the company's size, ask the reseller with whom you are doing business (or ask me) for advice on this issue.

We did evaluate other solutions and, in some cases, we also advised for this product, as it is specific to certain workloads. AWS and Google are the other vendors that we looked at.

Have a vendor agnostic partner to look at your environment and discuss the vision you have on this.

This product helps companies to build their own infrastructure in the cloud without the need of any physical server. This is nice for new, small companies. For big companies, there are services like containers, docker, and infrastructure as a service for making their environment less heavy and saving some costs, using hybrid infrastructure and service concept.

The most valuable feature is the possibility of using Microsoft and non-Microsoft services on one environment. For example, Windows servers, Linux servers, backup solutions from Veeam, etc.

There is no one special feature for me, as it makes sense as a complete package. I would mention container services as well, as this is the most modern concept of bimodal IT. For example, doing development in companies without the need of building development servers. You can just using some special parts as micro-services and putting them together like Lego pieces. This is the real benefit of cloud and Azure.

There should definitely be some improvement in the UI. It is lacking in terms of where the end user has to click on other icons and go back to the main menu to change some small settings and then go back through many options to the main request. This is something which Microsoft is constantly working on, but still it needs improvement.

Monitoring options should be more sophisticated, as there are dashboards on which a end user is able to pin a lot of charts and a number of web parts, but for example, I would love to have some option like in Operational Management Suite. For instance, some queries and filters Maybe those are already there, but I have not been able to find them. I have to combine the Operational Management suite for Infrastructure, PowerBI for subscription and Application Insight for applications.

Alternatively, I can create a PowerBI dashboard for everything, but this is not for everybody, as it is not always so easy.

Managing of separate subscriptions if you have more than one and in separate domains, it is not so easy to manage. I can’t merge all of my subscriptions, as I am able to have only one enterprise subscription in one account.

There have been no stability issues. I have some problems related to subscription management, but this is because I have more than one subscription and there were some problems related to merging those into one management.

There were no issues related to scalability at all.

Technical support is provided by ticketing system in the portal, so you can create a ticket and a few hours after that, the support guys will contact you, and will try to call you during business hours and will help you immediately. I had really specific problems a few times that needed longer discussion with support, but standard tasks were quickly resolved.

Nice and smooth since the beginning.

Related to pricing and licensing, you have to be careful how you operate with the concept. You would like to set some automation rules for automated shutdown and start up your virtual machines so that they are not consumed costs, etc. So it is about the logic of using this solution.

We evaluated Google and Amazon.

Prepare everything before implementation. Make your plan and calculate what should be the best solution or alternative for you.

This solution is at the top of what you can get at the moment on the market. There are huge amounts of separate tools and scenarios from infrastructure monitoring and administering, to hybrid scenarios or quick service creation and maintenance. The main benefit is the possibility of creating quick services, which you can select from many Microsoft and third-party service providers as well.

• Quick and easy deployment
• Complete packaged solutions to deploy (Web Apps service)
• Clear pricing
• Low cost
• Easy scaling
• Cost effectiveness (stopping a VM when not in use)
• High availability
• Easy restore and recovery
• Integration with Active Directory and Office 365. There are many benefits. For example, there is a special customized portal for all apps and services built in Azure AD (myapps.microsoft.com) with a seamless single sign-on experience for the users in AD or Office 365.

It improved our project completion time. A new server or solution requirements are now solved in hours instead of in weeks.

What we experienced after two years with an Azure suscription is that there is good knowledge in Microsoft Partners for Azure, but generally they are too specialized and couldn't cover everything, because they allways miss something related by example to networking, database, web apps, security, or integration on Azure. So you must contract more than one Microsoft Partner to have a successful project in Azure.

I have been using Azure for two years.

We had no stability issues.

It is very easy and quick to scale up or scale out. It has automatic scaling by CPU performance or other rules.

Support is very good, fast, responsive, and effective.

We used traditional on-premises virtual machines and switched to Azure for better cost and faster deployment.

The only complexity was the initial setup of a site-to-site VPN to connect our LAN to Azure. The required Azure site-to-site VPN gateway is not fully supported on older firewalls, so you must be careful. For details please read: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-...

Azure’s price is very competitive with traditional hosting (in-house or outsourced). Windows and database licenses are included in the solution price or you can bring your own license (BYOL). There are also several free or open source solutions in Azure.

We looked at AWS. In our case, Microsoft had very competitive pricing due to our Office 365 agreement.

Test it for free with the advice of an experienced Microsoft partner.

• Virtual machines, both Windows and Linux based
• Blob storage
• Azure file storage
• SQL server

This product has facilitated development, testing, rapid deployment, spot resource needs, with a remote off-site that compliments on-premises for the hybrid cloud.

The user interface is great if you like tablet, a.k.a., Windows type functionally. The PowerShell is robust. However, there is not much in between, although you can do a lot of customizing views, dashboards, and other things.

I like the extensiveness of the new VS classic interface. At times, I still find the AWS dashboards simpler and more streamlined. Nevertheless, Azure is more elegant.

I have used the product for several years.

I had no stability issues.

There were no issues, as long as your credit card can also scale.

I don't know about technical support, as I have not had to deal with them. But the various communities, forums, and resources are outstanding.

We have deployed, and continue to use:

• AWS EC2
• EBS
• S3 Glacier
• Route 53
• Lightsail
• Google
• Bluehost DPS
• An onsite mix of Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware

We are doing hybrid to address different needs.

Having used AWS, VMware, as well as Windows, there was a little bit of a learning curve, just as there was for others.

However, navigating the UI, shells, and figuring out what was where, without spending weeks in seminars, training, and watching videos, was actually pretty intuitive.

If you are not used to working with AWS or others, or if you have some tools, Azure is actually pretty extensible and getting easier to working from Windows and vice versa.

Do your homework, understand the type and sizes of resources, see if there are any extra fees, and find out what tools are needed.

Check what level of performance, availability, capacity and economic (PACE) budget, as well as the services that are needed.

Watch your costs and look for value versus the lowest cost.

We looked at AWS, Rackspace, Google, Microsoft, Bluehost, and VMware.

Don't be scared, be prepared; do your homework.

Look beyond lower cost and instead focus on value, enablement, ease of use, compatibility, resiliency, ability to scale with the stability of performance, capacity, and availability.

Look at the extensiveness of services versus a simple check box.

You also need to identify any concerns about the cloud, categorize them, and then discuss with others how to address them, or seek a workaround.

If you cannot find somebody to chat with, drop me a note.

The Canvas flow interface brings a very nice functionality that improves self-learning.

Selecting and applying a machine learning algorithm is not a click-and-run process. In this case, clustering our data has helped us to find patterns and trends that were not visible using conventional (internal) classification.

Stronger R integration in a circular fashion (Azure->R->Azure). Nowadays, it has an unidirectional bias.

I've used Machine Learning Studio for the last six months.

We've had no issues with the deployment.

By using a free account for cloud services can bring you "queued" status, but normally it runs smoothly. The quota defined for free account is enough for a variety of experiments and none of the features are blocked.

We've had no issues with the scalability.

As a cloud service, online chat and email service are available, but the community forums are the best place to solve issues.

We have a support maintenance agreement for Windows/Office.

There are a few competitors in place, and their number is increasing, but friendliness is the strong point of AzureML, comparing to Amazon AWS or BigML.

It does not involve any setup, just having an Outlook or Microsoft account.

Using a free account leads to offline projects. For online projects those issues must be evaluated according to client side company's environment.

Machine learning is just one part of the whole data science cycle. Big data (streaming, video, etc.) or deep learning needs must be addressed with additional tools. But for prediction/classification this is a fantastic tool.

Below is a PCA graph generated by K-means training model and its Qlik Sense panel. The idea is to segment unlabeled data based on numerical features in order to find common patterns that can be grouped, named clusters.

Easy and fast provisioning of Cloud Services including Web sites, Virtual Machines and Databases.

Great for application development testing, staging and production slots.

Better Support and community than the others.

The onboarding services are great for new customers.

No more hardware purchases, software and vendor support contracts = Lower times to production.

Great storage capabilities.

N/A

• Resource manager
• API
• Cloud storage
• Virtual machine hosting

Our company plans to use Azure for training and for internal use. We use ADFS and the cloud storage mostly. We are also moving to host labs in Azure to offload demand from our datacenter, when additional hosting capacity is required without notice.

The system has some limitations on resource use, such as number of cores, max transactions, I/O, maximum number of VMs etc. These limits make some things very difficult, and could be improved. Also Azure is constantly undergoing changes, and the move to Azure API v2 offers a lot of improvement, but is still rather unfinished. Once it is complete it will be great, but in the meantime there is much room for improvement. Microsoft is constantly looking for ways to improve, so many of the improvements I can think of, they are already working on.

A little over one year

There were some issues with development and the resource limitations. We also ran into a problem with networking. Network changes over the API are synchronous, and only one change can occur at any given time, locking the subscriptions networking config until the last operation completed. This was resolved in the V2 API. Most of the problems we ran into with V1 are resolved and simplified in V2.

There have been few problems with stability. Only a couple times there were outages that only impacted our development environment. Notice of these service interruptions are generally given with plenty of time to prepare.

There are limits as to how much resources you can use in Azure (as with all cloud platforms). This can be a problem if you plan to host hundreds of virtual machines with an hours’ notice. They have a process that requires a customer to go through tech support, and request/justify the need for a resource increase. If you need more than 20 networks, you will need to open a new subscription, and move resources to that subscription. They simply will not budge on some limit increases, and will on others. Currently opening up a new subscription is the solution to the resource limit problem. Azure is not really intended to handle our level of churn (creation and deletion of hundreds of VMs per minute), but we have been able to work with them and work around the problems we ran into.

The level of customer service is generally very good. They are quick to respond and resolve the problem quickly. I have had a couple of issues where the technical support staff didn’t interpret the problem correctly and moved a severe issue down from a two hour response time to a 24 hour response time. I quickly responded and told them that it was impacting ongoing business, and they moved the ticket back up, and resolved it within the two hour timespan. All other interaction with customer service has been outstanding. After a co-worker posted on Twitter making a remark about the UI, we received a call from customer service. They setup a meeting with us to discuss what problems we ran into with the new UI, and they asked us for input on what their developers could do to improve our experience. They were taking a proactive approach to customer service, not waiting for a problem to come to them, but sought out those with problems and resolved them.

I would rate their support at 8/10. A ten being perfect support without ever running into a problem, one being at a very poor level of customer support. I consider a rating of 8 to be a high rating. I should also add that the only support I have received has been for free, this only includes sales related issues and limit increases. I don’t have experience with their paid technical support which I would expect to be much better. They will charge for support even if you are a paying customer, so a rating of 8/10 reflects the support fees as well.

In the past, we used our own solution. We have datacenters where we host our in house solutions. We didn’t completely switch to Azure, but did offload some things to free up hardware for other purposes. We also want to offload hosting to Azure in times of high demand.

The setup for us is quite complex because we need to integrate it into a custom solution. The setup includes development time and changes to our core systems. This is not an easy task, but it's not at the fault of Azure or any other cloud service provider. The API has a learning curve, but anyone familiar with cloud services, and the use of a remote API should have no problem learning and implementing their system.

We implemented our solution in house. Most Azure integration is done by me. Azure is simple enough that interfacing your system with Azure can be done by a single person.

As for time to ROI I am not sure, these details are determined by upper management. The main components for the return is the idea that we will not only be able to offer a new set of training material for Azure specific material as a new product, but we can also avoid purchasing expensive equipment to satisfy a short term need for hardware and resources. Long term needs are hosted in house on our equipment. Even with the high cost of Azure hosting, purchasing additional equipment for a temporary need can result in a large amount of unnecessary costs.

Our setup costs are the costs of development time to integrate our system with Azure. Because the project is ongoing, this is difficult to determine. The cost for subscriptions in development is about $150 a month. Our MSDN subscription includes a credit which takes care of this cost. In production we forward the costs of events to the customer who is hosting the event. I don’t get the exact details on the day to day operation costs for internal subscriptions.

We evaluated the Google Cloud and AWS. All have a varying range of features and paradigms. Some appear to be cheaper, but when you add up the costs and read the fine print, you find that this may not be the case. We do plan to offer services on other platforms as well, but that is a different project. I have done research on all platforms to make sure the core system is compatible with all others. Azure is so far my favourite. The support is great, and the pricing is easy to work out. Other options had a lot of fine print and stipulations. Also the API is very easy to use, with plenty of references on MSDN.

Overall, it is a great, solution but is a bit expensive, has some minor limitations, and working around these limits can be a challenge. I still gave Azure a high score because of the support, feature set, availability, and the tools and documentation provided for the API.

My advice is to be very clear on the costs associated with what you plan to do. Most people will ask how much it costs to host their infrastructure in Azure, but that question is different for each scenario. Microsoft has an Azure price calculator that you can use to estimate the costs for your planned architecture. I would also recommend doing extensive research on the limits imposed by Microsoft. There is a page that details these limits, but there are some things that are not visible to the users. I would also recommend researching the hidden layers of the storage platform known as storage stamps, and how it can impact the copy speed of storage blobs.