Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Cloud-Native Applications: If you are building cloud-native applications that are designed to run on Azure, AVS may not be the best solution. In this case, you should consider using Azure-native services, such as Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or Azure Functions.Minimal Workloads: If you have a small number of workloads, it may not be cost-effective to use AVS. In this case, you can consider using Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) or other Azure services that are better suited for small workloads.Custom Hardware Configurations: If you require custom hardware configurations or specialized hardware, AVS may not be able to meet your requirements. In this case, you can consider using other Azure services, such as Azure Dedicated Hosts, that offer more flexibility in terms of hardware configurations.Cost-Sensitive Workloads: If you have cost-sensitive workloads, AVS may not be the best solution. While AVS offers many benefits, it can also be more expensive than other Azure services. In this case, you should consider using Azure services that are more cost-effective, such as Azure Virtual Machines.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Provision of the container-based applications Protection of multi-cloud and bare-metal environments Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Easier access to features and editing your own dashboard Read full review Support Rating 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 .
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Read full review Cost Savings: One of the key benefits of AVS is that it can help businesses save money by reducing the costs associated with maintaining and upgrading on-premises infrastructure. AVS can help businesses improve their agility by enabling them to quickly provision and scale VMware workloads in Azure. Read full review ScreenShots