Azure Virtual Machines

Azure VMs will be best suited in terms of flexibility, scalability, and reliability.
Also for cloud management and optimization solutions one can trust the Azure VM. We can leverage VMs for various use cases, including application hosting, development and testing, data analysis, disaster recovery, and hybrid cloud deployments.
One more thing with Azure Is that they provide a great customer support as well

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.

We tend to use as much App Services, and Serverless as we can. But what those win in ease of use and efficiency, they lack in flexibility. Many workloads cannot run on those services. Especially when you need heavy and time-consuming computing. Azure Virtual Machines on the other hand, give you anything you need in terms of flexibility, since you have access to the underlying OS, and for the fraction of the price. But as always, it's a tradoff, since you also need to manage, reboot, maintain, and patch those VMs

The VM deployment process is really simple in Azure Virtual Machines. But as I said earlier, compute types were a bit limited when I used it. In a few scenarios we had requirements for a Bare Metal GPU instance for high performance compute, but it wasn't available, so we had to look for alternatives.

My experience has been positive so far. There is so much documentation online that I have yet to run into any real issues that were not self-produced. You should understand what workloads are suitable to run in the cloud before migrating your entire datacenter. Expect latency and possibly downtime that is out of your control.

We've never used on-premise servers and have a cloud-native business. VMs are fairly straightforward products with a wide range of use cases. Lots of availability zones to increase redundancy and lots of configuration options ie VPCs etc.

Using a self-hosted integration runtime with Azure Data Factory, although only supports Windows, will make it more expensive. Hosting DevOps tools, such as Jenkins, code scanners, etc. can be set up very easily and replicated if needed. Any kind of distributed architecture, like Selenium grid for GUI testing of applications, can be set up very easily because of the myriad of possibilities for OSs.

Scaling up virtual machines is very easy and can be automated as well. Based on the inbound traffic, the virtual machines get scaled up and down. If the traffic is low, they scale down and if the traffic goes high, they scale up. Eventually, it saves the overall costs.

Azure Virtual Machines are best suited for internet-hungry applications as it provides great internet bandwidth. We have used it for our .Net development and found the VMs very responsive. Azure Virtual Machines must provide the same internet latency for Linux-based OS. Support for services is very good with the Microsoft OS but Azure Virtual Machines needs to improve the compatibility issues with the Linux OS.

As a Tool CoE Team, we need to evaluate multiple different tools available in the market and we need to deploy on multiple different platforms like Windows and Linux, It is well suited for these types of scenarios where we can quickly deploy and test the product capabilities. There may be scenarios where Azure Virtual Machines may be less appropriate but I haven’t come across any so far.

It is recommended for quick prototypes and development environments where you need to provision virtual machines quickly and easily, billing and costing have so many options and scenarios where you can choose from. It is sometimes hard to troubleshoot problems occurring for the networking part of the virtual machine where you need to be very careful especially if you are using VPN scenarios.

Azure Virtual Machines are well suited in scenarios where an organization has a cloud-first IT strategy, which requires applications, databases, and other IT services to be hosted in the Microsoft Azure public cloud. Azure Virtual Machines allow an organization to effectively host their applications while also maintaining control of the platform, for example, server patching and OS version upgrades. There are many different specification options for Azure Virtual Machines which allow the organization to decide on price vs performance.

When you need to have multiple servers for different operations, you don't really "need" to have a different server, you can use Azure Virtual Machine to create multiple servers fit for your specifics needs.

It is well suited for anyone who needs to run a VM (Windows or Linux). Really quick to deploy and start using it.

Easy way to utilise development of applications inside of the MS eco-system. Also enables integration into a pre-existing billing structure on Microsoft cloud.