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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Microsoft Azure

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.

    $29

    per month

    Qubole

    Score5 out of 10
    N/AQubole is a NoSQL database offering from the California-based company of the same name.N/A
    Pricing
    Microsoft AzureQubole
    Editions & Modules
    Developer
    $29
    per month
    Standard
    $100
    per month
    Professional Direct
    $1000
    per month
    Basic
    Free
    per month
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Microsoft AzureQubole
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsThe free tier lets users have access to a variety of services free for 12 months with limited usage after making an Azure account.—
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Microsoft AzureQubole
    Considered Both Products
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    Qubole
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    92%
    Would buy again
    34 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    31 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    95%
    Happy with the feature set
    35 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    89%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    24 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    94%
    Implementation went as expected
    34 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Microsoft AzureQubole
    Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
    Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Microsoft Azure and Qubole
    Feature
    Microsoft Azure
    8.4
    27 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Qubole
    -
    Ratings
    Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime8.126 Ratings00 Ratings
    Dynamic scaling8.725 Ratings00 Ratings
    Elastic load balancing8.624 Ratings00 Ratings
    Pre-configured templates8.225 Ratings00 Ratings
    Monitoring tools8.326 Ratings00 Ratings
    Pre-defined machine images8.424 Ratings00 Ratings
    Operating system support8.926 Ratings00 Ratings
    Security controls8.626 Ratings00 Ratings
    Automation8.224 Ratings00 Ratings
    NoSQL Databases
    Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Microsoft Azure and Qubole
    Feature
    Microsoft Azure
    -
    Ratings
    Qubole
    8.3
    1 Ratings
    3% below category average
    Performance00 Ratings7.01 Ratings
    Availability00 Ratings6.01 Ratings
    Concurrency00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
    Security00 Ratings7.01 Ratings
    Scalability00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Data model flexibility00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Deployment model flexibility00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Microsoft AzureQubole
    Small Businesses
    IBM Cloud Object Storage
    Score9 out of 10
    IBM Cloudant
    Score7.4 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
    Score8.7 out of 10
    IBM Cloudant
    Score7.4 out of 10
    Enterprises
    SAP on IBM Cloud
    Score9 out of 10
    IBM Cloudant
    Score7.4 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Microsoft AzureQubole
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.7
    (96 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    10.0
    (17 ratings)
    6.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    8.3
    (36 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Availability
    6.8
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.0
    (27 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Microsoft AzureQubole
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Microsoft
    Azure is particularly well suited for enterprise environments with existing Microsoft investments, those that require robust compliance features, and organizations that need hybrid cloud capabilities that bridge on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In my opinion, Azure is less appropriate for cost-sensitive startups or small businesses without dedicated cloud expertise and scenarios requiring edge computing use cases with limited connectivity. Azure offers comprehensive solutions for most business needs but can feel like there is a higher learning curve than other cloud-based providers, depending on the product and use case.
    Read full review
    Qubole
    I find Qubole is well suited for getting started analyzing data in the cloud without being locked in to a specific cloud vendor's tooling other than the underlying filesystem. Since the data itself is not isolated to any Qubole cluster, it can be easily be collected back into a cloud-vendor's specific tools for further analysis, therefore I find it complementary to any offerings such as Amazon EMR or Google DataProc.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Microsoft
    • Microsoft Azure is highly scalable and flexible. You can quickly scale up or down additional resources and computing power.
    • You have no longer upfront investments for hardware. You only pay for the use of your computing power, storage space, or services.
    • The uptime that can be achieved and guaranteed is very important for our company. This includes the rapid maintenance for security updates that are mostly carried out by Microsoft.
    • The wide range of capabilities of services that are possible in Microsoft Azure. You can practically put or create anything in Microsoft Azure.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Qubole
    • From a UI perspective, I find Qubole's closest comparison to Cloudera's HUE; it provides a one-stop shop for all data browsing and querying needs.
    • Auto scaling groups and auto-terminating clusters provides cost savings for idle resources.
    • Qubole fits itself well into the open-source data science market by providing a choice of tools that aren't tied to a specific cloud vendor.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Microsoft
    • The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.
    • The documentation needs to be improved, and some advanced configuration options require research and experimentation.
    • Microsoft's licensing scheme is too complex for the average user, and Azure SQL syntax is too different from traditional SQL.
    Read full review
    Qubole
    • Providing an open selection of all cloud provider instance types with no explanation as to their ideal use cases causes too much confusion for new users setting up a new cluster. For example, not everyone knows that Amazon's R or X-series models are memory optimized, while the C and M-series are for general computation.
    • I would like to see more ETL tools provided other than DistCP that allow one to move data between Hadoop Filesystems.
    • From the cluster administration side, onboarding of new users for large companies seems troublesome, especially when trying to create individual cluster per team within the company. Having the ability to debug and share code/queries between users of other teams / clusters should also be possible.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Microsoft
    Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.
    Read full review
    Qubole
    Personally, I have no issues using Amazon EMR with Hue and Zeppelin, for example, for data science and exploratory analysis. The benefits to using Qubole are that it offers additional tooling that may not be available in other cloud providers without manual installation and also offers auto-terminating instances and scaling groups.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Microsoft
    As Microsoft Azure is [doing a] really good with PaaS. The need of a market is to have [a] combo of PaaS and IaaS. While AWS is making [an] exceptionally well blend of both of them, Azure needs to work more on DevOps and Automation stuff. Apart from that, I would recommend Azure as a great platform for cloud services as scale.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Qubole
    No answers on this topic
    Reliability and Availability
    Microsoft
    It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators
    Incentivized
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    Qubole
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Microsoft
    We were running Windows Server and Active Directory, so [Microsoft] Azure was a seamless transition. We ran into a few, if any support issues, however, the availability of Microsoft Azure's support team was more than willing and able to guide us through the process. They even proposed solutions to issues we had not even thought of!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Qubole
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Microsoft
    As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.
    Read full review
    Qubole
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Microsoft
    As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Qubole
    Qubole was decided on by upper management rather than these competitive offerings. I find that Databricks has a better Spark offering compared to Qubole's Zeppelin notebooks.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Microsoft
    • For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
    • DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
    • Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Qubole
    • We like to say that Qubole has allowed for "data democratization", meaning that each team is responsible for their own set of tooling and use cases rather than being limited by versions established by products such as Hortonworks HDP or Cloudera CDH
    • One negative impact is that users have over-provisioned clusters without realizing it, and end up paying for it. When setting up a new cluster, there are too many choices to pick from, and data scientists may not understand the instance types or hardware specs for the datasets they need to operate on.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots