Azure Virtual Machines vs. Red Hat OpenStack Platform

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.

Incentivized

Best suited for - any organization where you have people who already have expertise on OpenStack, Linux & IP networking. Otherwise, the maintenance & operations will be difficult. When the number of deployed VMs reaches its capacity, it becomes very difficult to manage Red Hat OpenStack because there are no in-built fault management & performance management tools available within Red Hat OpenStack. Not suited for - Organizations where people have a culture of working on automated GUI-based tools. Here VMware wins over Red Hat OpenStack. Also where you have mission-critical applications where downtime cannot be tolerated.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Scaling of application components (VMs).
• Managing the networking between virtual machines.
• Management of VNFs & the underlying infrastructure.
• Availability & uptime of VMs because of features like VM migration & evacuation.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• User management really needs improvement - when compared to AWS or GCP.
• Security of the overall platform needs to be improved.
• The whole architecture needs to be modular which is not. Ex - Upgrading any particular component (nova, neutron, cinder) should be possible without upgrading the whole Red Hat OpenStack version.
• The creation of HEAT templates for complex applications is still a challenge & has a dependency on external tools.
• Stack creation still requires parameters modification at controllers & compute because of the complex nova-scheduler algorithm.

Incentivized

definitely it will be renewed. considering the ROI and uptime.

Incentivized

No VM console, weak management interface, changing CPU/memory is not straightforward. On the positive side, basic RDP functionality is good to have. As long as things are working, the ability to host Windows VMs is appreciated.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Only because of low cost & zero licensing of Red Hat OpenStack

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Saved CAPEX for sure (I can't quote a figure).
• Saved Opex also - because a large support community is already available.
• Increased complexity of system setup though.

Incentivized