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October 22, 2020
We're using Microsft Azure services on multiple regions from our organization and for several types of workloads. It is our current Global standard for Cloud usage, following a global contract with Microsoft. In my region, we're using Computing services (running some Dev/PreProd environments on Azure). We also recently migrated Windows 2008 servers from legacy applications to Azure, in order to keep extended support. We're also using Storage Accounts both for Data archiving (through 3rd party Archiving tools) and Backup to Cloud.
As with many companies, it is addressing the 'elastic' demands, specially for Dev/PreProd environments... Many times we need to deploy temporary environments for some applications and we don't have enough time to purchase an expansion on our OnPrem environment. Cloud is a great escape for this situation.
Also, It addresses the need of retaining Archived files and Backups for long term. We were able to bring great savings with Data Archiving solution in place today.
As with many companies, it is addressing the 'elastic' demands, specially for Dev/PreProd environments... Many times we need to deploy temporary environments for some applications and we don't have enough time to purchase an expansion on our OnPrem environment. Cloud is a great escape for this situation.
Also, It addresses the need of retaining Archived files and Backups for long term. We were able to bring great savings with Data Archiving solution in place today.
- Elasticity - the ability to expand and reduce in a few clicks.
- The huge variety of services it delivers (from VMs, to Containers, Storage, etc.)
- Reliability - if it is properly built, it is highly available.
- Complexity - due to its huge variety of services, it may be complex to implement and manage.
- Latency (performance) - if you don't have good connectivity (MS Express Route recommended for medium/large companies) you can have latency between your on-prem and cloud environments, which makes it not so interesting for some use cases.
March 05, 2020
Our organization is spread across the globe. Putting our servers in Azure has enabled us to offer high availability to our customers and development department.
- High Availability
- Ease of use
- Hybrid cloud
- Technical Support
- Open source features are lacking
- Documentation
August 19, 2019
We use our Azure storage accounts for blob storage and SMB shares. They don't work on all ISP providers or hotspots. They work on Verizon fiber and cellular hotspots but not one of our local ISPs. We use the SQL server and database services. I really like how easy it is to scale them up and down, live.
We also have a website app meant for internal use and use the SendGrid account connector. It is really nice to have easy white-listing for everything: websites, databases, etc. that we can trust. We host everything here instead of making servers VPN into our office.
Additionally, we have a site-to-site VPN between our offices and Azure. That works well and enabled us to turn off much of our public access.
We use the built-in VM backup tools and those have been really easy to use right there on Azure. Also, the snapshots automatically built into databases we have used several times. It creates a new database from a snapshot from every few hours from up to almost 30 days ago and then you just copy over whatever data you need.
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We also have a website app meant for internal use and use the SendGrid account connector. It is really nice to have easy white-listing for everything: websites, databases, etc. that we can trust. We host everything here instead of making servers VPN into our office.
Additionally, we have a site-to-site VPN between our offices and Azure. That works well and enabled us to turn off much of our public access.
We use the built-in VM backup tools and those have been really easy to use right there on Azure. Also, the snapshots automatically built into databases we have used several times. It creates a new database from a snapshot from every few hours from up to almost 30 days ago and then you just copy over whatever data you need.
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- Snapshots of databases are just built-in and super easy to choose one to recover from.
- It's the way we sync our local domain controller with Office 365. I'm not aware of another option to do this. It has some limitations, but at least it keeps all the passwords in sync.
- Samba file shares have been really nice. As long as the ISPs involved allow them, it's the easiest way to set up mapped drives shared with others. The performance is slow, but it's fine.
- It is easy to manage the static public and private IPs that are being used, in one central place.
- Adding extra data disks to VMS is nice and easy. The performance has been fine for our general use.
- The AD sync between Office 365 and our controller syncs passwords well enough, but data is a pain. Usually, you have to update everything in AD and can't from anywhere else after you turn on the syncing.
- Need more security controls and file-level access controls on SMB shares, unless I'm missing something.
- More tooltips on settings would be helpful, at least if you turn on a novice mode or something. It's built for system admins and has a steep learning curve for people doing basic things.
Microsoft Azure is one of the best IaaS cloud platforms that we have used ever. You can quickly set up most Windows server applications with a high availability. My experience with Azure is overall good and would definitely recommend this to others. Microsoft has a very responsible customer support.
- Responsible customer support
- The web apps work fairly well
- Offers easier creation of hybrid clouds
- Availability of so many services
- A lot of features on beta tests
- Interface still feels overly complicated
- No other issues was identified
Microsoft Azure is being used across the entire organization at this time. It is being customized for use with individual departments. We use it at my non-profit and I also operate it at a large, regional, mid-western electric and gas utility.
Azure has allowed us to quickly and reliably connect to information across our network in a seamless fashion. We are able to share links and data very quickly. It also allows us the advantage to use PowerBI to access data from many different departments because they are all in one place.
Azure has allowed us to quickly and reliably connect to information across our network in a seamless fashion. We are able to share links and data very quickly. It also allows us the advantage to use PowerBI to access data from many different departments because they are all in one place.
- Allows large amounts of data to be saved in a logical fashion
- Provides easy access from any intranet or internet connection
- Allows us to handle security in a logical and fluid fashion
- I would like to see more support around video. It is okay for now but distributing the images across a wide audience doesn't allow us to utilize Azure often.
- Permissions and training for new users can be a little daunting. Acceptance is slow when it is presented to a new department or an individual or team that lacks technical expertise. Once we teach them its fine but the 'official' instructions are alternately too complex and off the mark.
August 12, 2019
Microsoft Azure is being use to connect with Azure specific customers and to optimize Microsoft workloads. While competing clouds have strong Microsoft options, the complete feature set and performance tuning of Azure for Microsoft workloads still wins also. Also, with the new pricing structure announcement, Azure becomes more cost competitive for those Microsoft workloads as well.
- Microsoft effectively tunes for their own applications
- Creates specific products for Microsoft deployments
- Decent Infrastructure as Code (IaC) support
- Maintains some Microsoft exclusive design patterns that the industry has not adopted
- Steep learning curve for the non Microsoft crowd
- Expensive
August 12, 2019
Microsoft Azure has been our platform of choice since 2015. We initially implemented a backup solution but grew into the environment as we required more and more resources. Now we take advantage of the ecosystem consisting of websites, SQL servers, virtual machines just to name a few.
- All the apps are quickly configurable by only a few pages of clearly defined options.
- The speed of deployment is incredible - websites, databases and virtual machines are up and running in minutes.
- The product is constantly evolving both in terms of features and user-friendliness.
- The pricing model is too complex, making it difficult to evaluate and compare with different solutions.
- The console is somewhat cluttered compared to, for example, Google Cloud.
- The support is very basic without the extra support plan purchased.
We use Azure across our entire business and it solves all of our infrastructure and hosting needs. We use it for:
1) Software development: We build software using App Services, AKS, Azure Functions, Event Grid, Sql Server
2) Running our internal programs: We use Logic apps and AKS to run our custom production apps.
3) Hosting SaaS products for our customers: We build products for our customers and run them in AKS and monitor using Microsoft Azure monitor / app insights.
1) Software development: We build software using App Services, AKS, Azure Functions, Event Grid, Sql Server
2) Running our internal programs: We use Logic apps and AKS to run our custom production apps.
3) Hosting SaaS products for our customers: We build products for our customers and run them in AKS and monitor using Microsoft Azure monitor / app insights.
- We really like the PaaS offerings. AKS master node is managed by MS, and we only pay for the nodes.
- Microsoft Azure functions can run be hosted and run inside of Kubernetes. This allows solutions based on Azure functions cloud agnostic.
- New services are added frequently and existing services have features added often. It is hard to keep up.
- Microsoft Azure functions does not have a "Configure Services" method. Programming Azure functions has a slightly different programming model than does a "normal" API application. I would prefer that the startup process be identical.
August 16, 2019
We use it for spinning up virtual environments and hosting software for clients. We use cold and hot storage for client's servers and backups with Azure as they offer some of the best storage rates as compared to AWS. We can also spin up virtual domain and active directories for our clients to remove the heat and maintenance from small facilities on the edge of their environment that might not have a dedicated space for IT. This allows us to offsite not only IT but also the infrastructure.
- Storage
- VM
- Control
- Price on VMs
- Could be easier to setup redundancy
- Transparent price
August 11, 2019
We use Microsoft Azure both divisionally and corporately. We have a partner-agreement with Microsoft and a significant investment in order to migrate as much of our server infrastructure into the cloud as we can. This allows us to be more flexible in hiring since servers a not on-prem and location-based, and given us access to tools we never had before. The centralized billing is a huge asset.
- Transparency to what everyone in the Org you support is working on.
- The centralized billing and administrator controls allow us great organization and flexibility to keep things centralized yet virtually based.
- The access to the multitude of options to enhance your cloud performance and experience is unparalleled.
- I don’t like the pre-paid billing. Forking over a boat-load of money up to a year before you use a service is a financial loss for us on the interest.
- Feels as if there are too many options, bells, and whistles you could add.
- With so many options available, it’s really up to you to discover if they are helpful to you or not. Some of the options I’ve never heard of before, and documentation is hard to come by.
Azure is being used in many aspects of our organization. It is being used across all departments of the organization. It helps address the seamless scale-out of our growing infrastructure needs.
- Provides seamless scale-out of services.
- The service model ensures that we only pay for what we use.
- The available-anywhere nature of the cloud-based services makes it ideal for our increasingly mobile users.
- The service is constantly updated, which is good except that because of these there can be situations where re-training and configuration changes become necessary year-round.
- The service can become pricey if not closely managed and monitored.
- Support quality can be hit-or-miss, seemingly at random based on the experience and ability of the technician that your tickets are assigned to.
I have used Microsoft Azure previously to run some machine learning algorithms that processed a large amount of data and made predictions. This allowed us to improve someone's performance.
- Microsoft Azure is great for machine learning.
- Microsoft Azure is cheap and user-accessible.
- Microsoft Azure allows for making predictions from large sets of information.
- It is not that user-friendly.
- It requires a lot of data and time to teach algorithms
- The credits can get quite costly for small projects.
August 17, 2019
Microsoft Azure is being deployed using Azure stack on top of cloud services in an on-premise environment setup in our organization. It is prominently operated by our IT department to provide on-demand scalable platform solution to be used by support and business units. Main users in the organization are product departments who are responsible to deliver digital services and data monetization business units.
- The ability to allocate resources: storage capacity, memory availability and processing power-on-demand dynamically are the main strengths.
- Platform compatibility with leading technologies and international standards.
- Excellent after-sales support is definitely one of the key factors in using Microsoft Azure.
- There is a lot of room for improvement in the pricing schema.
- Regional availability needs to be improved, since some governments regulate that physical data center must sit within their jurisdictional location.
- 'Vendor lock-in' risk might jeopardize the user's bargaining position.
August 17, 2019
We are using Microsoft Azure as one of our primary cloud providers and we've offloaded several of our production workloads to it. We are a heavy user of storage accounts as well as function apps. It helps us quickly roll out projects to production where we can innovate and experiment.
- Speed to market
- Provides a familiar environment for existing Microsoft users
- Good catalog of services
- Some their preview items are not ready for Production
- Even having enterprise support, it can take finesse to find the right contact on certain services
- It suffers from growing pain as it improves.
August 29, 2019
Azure is one of the leading hyper scalers having 54 regions globally today as of writing this comment. They provide scalable compute, network, storage and other functionality helping organizations to scale and grow their businesses rapidly. As a Senior Solutions Architect helping many small to large enterprises to embark on their cloud transformation journey, I have personally noticed the growing preference for Azure as a choice of platform.
- SQL Database as a service.
- Hybrid benefits.
- Extended support for EOL applications and OS.
- Provisioning times relatively long compared to other platforms.
- Azure backup restore can take forever sometimes.
- Not able to upload custom images.
August 26, 2019
Microsoft Azure provides seamless data access on the cloud. Currently in our organization this is being used department wide. We are using this for hosting our applications on virtual machines and managing the same on the cloud. As well for data storage purposes.
Platform hosting and resources availability is excellent. It's highly secure and infrastructure recovery is pretty fast and seamless. Large scale data storage is no longer an issue. Virtual machines availability is pretty cool.
Platform hosting and resources availability is excellent. It's highly secure and infrastructure recovery is pretty fast and seamless. Large scale data storage is no longer an issue. Virtual machines availability is pretty cool.
- Setup of new server is pretty much simple and easily scalable as per traffic.
- Robust and stable platform so it's a convenient solution for IT infrastructure on cloud.
- Easy to create and manage the cloud assets. Server load controlling is awesome.
- Easily able to build and deploy the applications and servicies.
- Its advance level tasks do require a steep learning curve and more experience.
- Pricing model is a bit costly so if any resource(s) are not in use then cancel it. Yes, cancellation is pretty much quick and simple.
- A few Azure services require additional supporting tools.
August 20, 2019
Previously we were using an in-house server and multiple systems by uploading multiple operating systems. Now, we have eliminated the cost of an in-premise server and multiple systems by deploying multiple operating Linux servers over the Azure cloud and SQL server as well as well over cloud.
- It helps to manage all my resources in the azure portal easily.
- Visual studio also provides an option for Azure.
- It also provides GitHub integration to Azure web app deployment and it is simply genius.
- It is simple to implement but documentation could be better
- VM failure is a continuous issue
[It's being used] Across a specific department; allows us to model data and to carry out a selection of machine learning tasks around data from our reports.
- Pricing models
- Great security and network resilience
- AD integration
- Lack of stable frameworks or libraries
- No local stored data
- Poor documentation for some areas
Microsoft Azure provides reasonable pricing and even deeper global infrastructure. We don`t know an alternative with similar benefits. The implementation team is very supportive and responsible, easy to contact and gives a fast reaction. It offers the availability of so many services, like web apps, VMs, CDN, SQL servers, good storage options, etc. It's a good service and we use it daily.
- Is very intuitive.
- Non-developers can easily create a website.
- The Azure developer community is very responsible.
- Good price policy.
- It is a little lengthy process could be a little simple.
- Can sometimes get a little buggy.
- No other issues.
February 16, 2019
Microsoft Azure is used by departments to manage larger data sets across entities. The software addresses the need for multiple users to have access to multiple different data sets simultaneously. The software makes this relatively easy by making Microsoft Azure similar to the user-friendliness of other Microsoft products. Users point their analytical tools at Azure for data visualization and analytics. Some analytics is also done in Azure itself.
- Perhaps the biggest advantage of Microsoft Azure is its ease of integration with other Microsoft products. If you're used to using Excel, Access, SQL Server, and other Microsoft products, Azure will fit in nicely.
- Azure does a good job at pointing the user into user-friendly methods for data capture and analysis. In fact, I think Azure does the best job at this compared to competing tools.
- Microsoft Azure has recently made strides in implementing advanced analytics, such as machine learning. Their advances are great and integrate nicely with the tool.
- Microsoft Azure's movement into machine learning and other advanced analytics are somewhat behind the curve. Other tools that have been doing this for a long time have set up easier user interfaces.
- Azure seems to run slower than other big data housing tools. I think this might be because of Microsoft's attempt to make Azure more user-friendly.
- I think Azure could improve its product by making it even more like Microsoft Excel. I know that's not what Azure if for, but hey, it's Microsoft, they could make it more spreadsheet-ish.
February 15, 2019
We are currently using Microsoft Azure across the whole organization. However department by department are choosing what functions to utilize or not. Some of the main functions we are using are Dev Ops for code storage and continuous integration, Power BI, Data Lake and reporting functions, SQL, IIS, App services and more are also in use across the organization
- Wealth of white papers and documents for support
- Every function or process you could need is there
- frequent upgrades and updates to fix any issues
- Sometimes its a bit overwhelming as to the volume of functions
- The layout could be more intuitive
- While there are a lot of support docs it could be laid out a bit better to help you get where you need to go
We use select Microsoft Azure products and APIs to complete some of our more machine learning-oriented tasks off-premise. This includes modeling data we receive from magnetometer sensors, recognizing environmental effects in data during hardware testing, and some other backend-related tasks like modeling traffic and parking behavior. Using these products allows us to move tasks that require lots of processing power to cloud products that are optimized for this purpose.
- Scalable pricing -- The Azure pricing scales with usage, so the cost per month becomes very clear early on, and the ML-related products for Azure are quite competitively priced.
- Security management on Microsoft Azure is better compared to other cloud platforms I've seen, and it's really easy to configure.
- Startup Programs -- It's easy to get credits to try out Microsoft Azure through the Microsoft/Azure for Startups program. No other service provides this access and support for startups for free.
- Poor documentation -- Microsoft's documentation can take a while to get used to, as the format and tutorials are a bit different compared to AWS and other cloud computing platforms.
- Some code interfaces/SDKs are not well-designed. Specifically, the Python and Java SDKs can be quite difficult to integrate.
- It's difficult to onboard, due to the lack of beginner-oriented documentation for some of the ML products. Some of the products require extensive knowledge of how to use Azure in production.
February 20, 2019
I was using Microsoft Azure as a part of the hybrid infrastructure. Part of our services were stored on-premise and lots of them were based on Microsoft Azure platform. A few that we used were Microsoft Azure Active Directory services, virtualization services, all the cross-connected with Office 365 services. Plus I had experience with a fully cloud-based Microsoft infrastructure with VPN tunnels from the local network to Microsoft Azure services.
- The best and the easiest integration with other Microsoft services.
- Great Web console interface -- good for all advanced and beginner IT specialists.
- Regular security and functionality upgrades.
- Options to try the product/solution absolutely for free to understand if it works for your current environment and company needs.
- Cloud computing -- one of the best options for your virtual environment on the market and if your company has Microsoft based infrastructure - integration with other MS services make this solution the best one.
- And you pay only for what you are using!
- MS technical support -- in most cases is horrible. Unless you use the support of MS partners, but that makes the cost higher.
- Comparing to other competitors on the market, customization of the virtual servers is not the most strong side of Microsoft Azure.
- Prices of services. That needs to be improved. In a small environment it is only so critical, but when you start growing it becomes a significant cost raise.
- We had issues transforming legacy servers and services from physical to virtual based on Azure. We had to use third-party solutions.
May 04, 2019
We use Azure to host our SaaS financial healthcare application built on asp.net MVC + SQL + ESB architecture. We currently use base IaaS, Azure SQL, Azure web apps, load balancers, and analytics. We migrated to Azure from a small cloud vendor for flexibility, cost savings and ease of meeting various security requirements.
- Azure Web app seems to be fairly decent
- Some Azure employees really care
- High VM failure rate and limited options in many regions.
- Azure SQL is the single worst product Microsoft has created.
- Lots of basic things can take 45 min (changing the config of a gateway/load balance for example).
- Low pricing flexibility makes AWS 2-3X cheaper.
- VMs with less than 4c/8GB often can't even run windows update or take hours to do so.
- AKS especially flaky with DNS issues, random downtimes.
- Often misses SLAs and requires the customer to ask for credit.
- Lots of recommended solutions for PaaS apps essentially require turning off your firewall.
- API, CLI, ARM are incomplete with diff gaps.
- Docs are out of date and incomplete.
- AG groups put on single node clusters that receive firmware updates at the same time.
- Azure apps for docker require non-TLS termination, violating most security controls by forcing unencrypted traffic from their internal LB to the app workers.
February 23, 2019
We use Microsoft Azure for our application hosting. Earlier we had a thirty party vendor which took care of our hosting. Later on, we explored and found out that Microsoft Azure was a very good option for our cloud. Gradually we moved almost all of our applications to Azure by end of 2018. We have different flavors like Web-apps, API Apps, Azure functions and Azure VM as well. As mentioned earlier we have on-premise thirty party hosting now that we have moved to being self-controlled by using Azure Cloud.
- When we use Azure Web apps, it provides a PAAS solution for our hosting.
- If we have specific tasks to be executed after intervals or continuous work, it provides Web jobs.
- We can move our DB to No SQL as well, which is also very useful.
- For storage purposes, we can use Azure Storage, like blobs in which we can create containers just like S3 buckets in AWS.
- Some times in Web apps we faced an issue that gives us an error while code swapping like it's already in use.
- Azure should provide more detailed errors for activity, also for activity logs. Logs should be searchable on the basis of time duration rather last 3 months.
- Syncing for two different Azure tables should be done parallel to one another.
Microsoft Azure Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
What is Microsoft Azure?
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service from Microsoft. With Azure, businesses and organizations can build, manage, and deploy applications on Microsoft’s global networking, using customizable tools and frameworks.
Azure supports any tool, language, or framework, providing access to 100+ services to provide a comprehensive cloud computing platform. Azure has as broad set of hybrid computing capabilities, with support for working in the cloud or on-premises.
According to Microsoft, Windows Server, SQL Server PaaS, and SQL Server IaaS are significantly more affordable alternatives to other software in their categories. Users can lower costs if they have existing licenses, reserve resources in advance, or move specific workloads to Azure, all dependent on the particular organization’s situation.
An example of some of the service areas Azure covers:
AI + Machine Learning
Analytics
Blockchain
Computing
Containers
Databases
Developer Tools
DevOps
Identity
Integration
Internet of Things
Management
Media
Stack
Migration
Mixed Reality
Mobile
Networking
Security
Storage
Web
Windows Virtual Desktop
Categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
Microsoft Azure Integrations
Stackify, APM+
Microsoft Azure Technical Details
| Operating Systems: | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application: | No |