Microsoft's Blob Storage system on Azure is designed to make unstructured data available to customers anywhere through REST-based object storage.
$0.01
per GB/per month
Azure Virtual Machines
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Virtual Machines (VMs) are available on Microsoft Azure, providing what is built as a low-cost, per-second compute service, available via Windows or Linux.
Amazon EC2 provides a cost-friendly server hosting platform but the underlying infrastructure of Azure Virtual Machines is way more speedy and responsive than AWS. We have a 40:60 ratio of our servers deployed on Azure and Amazon and I can tell you how responsive and …
Azure Virtual Machines is much easier to manage and is a user-friendly management console. Billing is much easier and more predictable to calculate and expect, the configuration is much easier to access and change, the cost is cheaper for Azure Virtual Machines than other …
Blob storage is well suited to hosting/sharing zipped files rather than several smaller files, as folder enumeration/listing is not supported. Files uploaded are case-sensitive, so users need to be educated on the correct naming convention format if they are delegating the file-sharing process outside of IT.
If you want to host a dedicated Windows server on the cloud, and especially if you want to integrate it with your on premises Active Directory, Azure Virtual Machines should be your first choice. Obviously running Linux on Azure works very well too, but given Azure's pricing is not the cheapest, there are other providers out there that have a better cost-benefit ratio for Linux. That said, hosting Windows on Azure can be affordable (especially when compared to other providers) if you plan your licensing, topology, and application architecture correctly.
When demand is high, we scale the service out, eg During a Football Match.
When a football match is over and the throughput of data from OPTA drops we save by the service scaling back in.
Our App Service Plans along with the Clean C# code are lightening fast giving a good customer experience.
When producing the TV Guide information and a program overruns its scheduled time, a client can instantly be updated to the new programming schedule as our change is instant and its in the right place for all the clients to download and adjust their television guides appropriately to send out to the public giving a 24x7 uptime service that is precise and accurate and resilient to outages due to failover zones around the world.
If we are transferring huge amount of data (outbound), it can get quite expensive.
With new features being added constantly, although a good thing, at times it becomes difficult to keep up with the changes. Documentation needs to keep UpToDate and should include best practices.
Performance can be improved especially when it comes to cold storage.
Pricing can be a concern if you are truly agnostic to which cloud you are building your particular solution in.
The UI, as is the case with any cloud provider, is crowded.
As with any cloud provider, it can be difficult to tune in exactly the right amount of servers for your needs...you might find yourself under/overprovisioning.
Blob storage is fairly simple, with several different options/settings that can be configured. The file explorer has enhanced its usability. Some areas could be improved, such as providing more details or stats on how many times a file has been accessed. It is an obvious choice if you're already using Azure/Entra.
Microsoft has improved its customer service standpoint over the years. The ability to chat with an issue, get a callback, schedule a call or work with an architecture team(for free) is a huge plus. I can get mentorship and guidance on where to go with my environment without pushy sales tactics. This is very refreshing. Typically support can get me to where I need to be on the first contact, which is also nice.
I give the overall support for Azure Virtual Machines a 7 because I think while the overall support do a great job there are still areas that it could improve on such as efficiency and speed. So while I only give it a 7 and it has some issues it is still better than the overall support at Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.
Azure Blob Storage is the best choice to store files when the app runs in Azure. It also has some advantages over S3, like Shared Access Signatures, that make it easy to control access to files directly via a URL. Azure Blob Storage is very fast and we have not had any major issues with it after using it for several years.
Azure Virtual Machines offer unparalleled flexibility in provisioning, managing and upgrading the VM instances, both manually and programmatically. AVM offer very granular billing options and enables high costs optimisations (while still being costly). The other competitors I mentioned are very good at offering dead-cheap VMs. But if you need anything beyond that, especially for big computing, you need Azure Virtual Machines.
It's so easy to spin up new instances, that it becomes also to easy to have to many of them to manage. Many teams end up with a couple of hundreds of VMs after a short while, making the whole thing very hard to maneuver
Azure VMs are the next step for us to rely on Onprem servers, and leaving the management of the infrastructure to the professionals
The ease of use, is also important when our main focus is to deliver new applications and integrations fast, and not having to worry about infrastructure. We sell bottles, not CPUs
