Overview
What is Microsoft Azure?
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters.
Why choose Azure?
Microsoft Cloud option
"Microsoft Azure is a reliable IaaS and DaaS and a bit of a challenge."
Microsoft Azure is the best cloud solution!
Azure poor customer service
Best Cloud Computing Solution
Microsoft Azure is a Class Unto Itself
Title For MS Azure
MS Azure Practical Use!
Azure is the leader in Cloud Services environment and should be where your next datacenter is built.
MS is a great trusted partner to build your tech on.
You do get what you pay for - if you want to
Azure: How a deallocated $0.11/hr instance cost over $500 in 3 months (Do the math).
Microsoft Azure- Great as PaaS, baby as IaaS
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Dynamic scaling (16)9.393%
- Elastic load balancing (16)8.888%
- Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime (16)8.787%
- Pre-configured templates (16)7.070%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Developer
$29
Standard
$100
Professional Direct
$1000
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $29 per month
Product Demos
Microsoft Azure Training - [3] Azure Accounts, Subscriptions and Admin Roles (Exam 70-533)
Azure Tutorial For Beginners | Microsoft Azure Tutorial For Beginners | Azure Tutorial | Simplilearn
Azure Training | Azure Tutorial | Intellipaat
Azure Fundamentals complete Training in telugu
Features
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
IaaS provides the basic building blocks for an IT infrastructure like servers, storage, and networking, in an on-demand model over the Internet
- 8.7Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime(16) Ratings
The service uptime as a percentage defined in the SLA
- 9.3Dynamic scaling(16) Ratings
Ease of scaling up or down in response to customer needs
- 8.8Elastic load balancing(16) Ratings
Automatic balancing and distribution of resources across multiple virtual computers
- 7Pre-configured templates(16) Ratings
Pre-defined templates for virtual machines
- 8Monitoring tools(16) Ratings
Monitoring tools provide alerts when problems are detected
- 8.4Pre-defined machine images(15) Ratings
Range of different server configurations available
- 9.5Operating system support(16) Ratings
Range of operating systems available as pre-configured images
- 9Security controls(16) Ratings
Compliance with security protocols like SSL and AES
- 8.7Automation(15) Ratings
Automation of administrative tasks
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Microsoft Azure?
Azure is a comprehensive computing platform, providing cloud infrastructure, products and services, developer tools, and innovations in data and AI. Azure has on-premises, hybrid, multicloud, and edge capabilities that offer the flexibility to innovate anywhere.
Developers can use their favorite languages, open-source frameworks, and tools to code and deploy. Azure includes over 200 physical datacenters arranged into more than 60 regions and upholds our customers' expectations with data residency, compliance, and high availability.
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
Microsoft Azure Integrations
- Stackify
- APM+
Microsoft Azure Competitors
- Amazon Web Services
- SAP HANA Cloud
- Google cloud
Microsoft Azure Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(968)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(51-75 of 88)Useful range of products!
- 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.
Azure can meet your needs
- Active Directory integration. Azure allows for solutions outside your environment to pull your AD information in a non-intrusive fashion to help you automate certain functions such as single sign-on.
- Great for deploying new applications without having to stand a server or develop a system in-house.
- Cloud computing at its best. So many features available to accommodate your networking needs with great security and resilience.
- Cloud based technologies always have some type of risk associated. Microsoft has addressed the lack stability of frameworks, libraries, etc.
- There is no local stored data available for easy access. No offline access to the system in case of a major system outage.
- It is great for all services like
- Iaas, Paas, Saas.
- It has an awesome speed of deployment, operation, and scalability which makes the work productive.
- Easy data migration makes it easier to integrate into the system and since all of our systems is Windows based it was much easier.
- Fully integrated Delivery Pipeline.
- Definitely the price. It is expensive when compared to its other competitors
- Another improvement that can be done is in the area of Application. Application insight can be made more to easy to migration to the logging from on-premise to cloud.
- Since it is huge it has got a number of bugs which sometimes troubles. So more documentation and the bug-free system would be an area of improvement.
- It helped in the migration of data.
- Testing our sites, services, and applications.
- Since we are more focused on research and development of our Analytical system its server reliability and ease of deployment makes our life easier.
- And also being used in the only department we have a small number of people so anyone able to deploy helps.
- Since we are working with excel or you can say Office 365, Azure work with it seamlessly which makes it an ideal solution.
Awesome Experience with Azure compare to Other Provider
It has addressed many issues. Compared to other cloud service providers, the Azure Management Console is far simpler to monitor. Since we migrated our server to Azure haven't faced any downtime. The second point is that Azure SQL as a Service has helped to optimize the cost and increase performance.
The response time of Azure customer service is amazing; I would usually get a callback from them within three hours.
- SQL as a Service is very cost effective and easier to manage. There are other vendors who provide SQL as a Service at cost higher than Azure
- Compared to AWS and Google, the Azure portal is easier to manage
- Its up to you when you want to scale your infrastructure . This is not the case with AWS for which you need to ask permission to access regions. Also if you want to upgrade RAM it takes 2 days to get it done
- There is no option to customize RAM which you can do with Google
- Customization of processors such as core , GPU etc. is not possible currently, and we have to choose from available options
- A few Technical queries should be allowed in the basic subscription
Azure is....
- high interoperability
- less cost
- high performance
- should make it more affordable
- lack of technical support
- function complicate for decision makers
Azure is good
- Webhosting
- Test environment
- High availability
- Making parallel things (such as nic and legacy network) which behave differently.
- Enable downtime for VPN portal.
- Build your own server.
Microsoft Azure Review
- Few clicks and servers are ready in a few minutes
- Cost effective, don't have to manage monitoring as you will get the alert as per your requirements
- Never have any performance issues, boosts the performance as per your needs
- The on-premise backup and restoration
- Disk encryption for critical apps/data
- Cost
Easy and quick provisioning
No need to monitor the services
Not Suited:
Low bandwidth
Without accelerated traffic
Without network appliance
Azure - The future is here
- The new portal is easy to use.
- The ability to have free trials of the new features such as Cognitive services/Cortana Anaytics is great.
- The elasticity of spinning up new hardware and only paying for what you use is really helpful for us.
- The templates for spinning up new hardware are not flexible enough.
Cognitive Services is great and a real breakthrough in terms of AI and application insights provide us with real-time application monitoring at a fraction of the price of some of the other big players in this space.
Microsoft Azure Unplugged!
- It's elastic and can easily be upgrade-able to meet specific requirements.
- The performance is relatively better if properly designed.
- It really performs outstanding for Microsoft suite of applications and can be tailored to meet the business requirements.
- Its so much evolving [that is is] hard to catch the new feature updates.
- SQL Azure is great but still needs to have CLR functionality.
- It doesn't provide VMs which can support greater than 448GB RAM for hosting IAAS.
Microsoft Azure Review
Benefits are: Only need to deploy the application and the rest is a Microsoft managed, hassle free environment. No need to worry about your Windows patching and updates; server running out of space, technical troubleshooting and maintenance cost. Time is saved in building up the servers and hardware non-utilization has been eliminated.
- Lift-and-shift: So you can move your application in azure very easily.
- Per-use pricing: As with other cloud services, Windows Azure charges the subscriber on per use basis. What this means is that if your application needs only two instances in the beginning, you will only pay for these two instances. At the moment your application starts needing four instances for example, you will start getting charged for those extra instances. This pricing model makes Windows Azure a great platform for applications that occasionally need a lot more resources than normal. It completely eliminates the need to purchase expensive hardware and software for building your applications.
- DownTime is very minor. It's been really reliable.
- Only Windows-centric applications are supported by Microsoft for technical assistance; hence it could be a tedious task to determine where exactly the fault is on an open source application running though windows Azure.
- It needs a better User Interface to compete with its competitor.
- More details in dashboard. It should be managed in a more subtype way.
Microsoft Azure Flying High In Cloud
- One of the Main Offerings that Azure provides is PaaS which is quite mature compared to other cloud providers in market.
- PaaS support in from developing an application to cloud till deploying it. PaaS support complete life cycle of an application: Building Testing, Deploying, Managing and Updating.
- Microsoft operates across the globe and has the highest number of data centers. It operates in 34 regions and are about to open 4 more regions. This is one of the biggest advantages over all the competitors.
- Azure has the hybrid capability unlike AWS cloud [which has] only approach. Azure provides us the ability to create hybrid environments allowing us to leverage on premise resources and the benefits of cloud. Azure can also help in building Hybrid applications.
- Pricing is the most important thing I would consider that needs improvement, pricing will play one of the important criteria in deciding between other cloud providers. It will also play a part in growth and adoption of Azure across the industries. So I think pricing is the area that needs improvement.
- Azure has the space of improvement in PaaS offering, it can bake and integrate many services and tools which other PaaS provider excel in that space. PaaS is the next big thing Azure should focus on developing.
- Integrating more developer specific features I would suggest need improvement. With a focus on cloud migration services and providing them, Azure should also focus on providing capabilities for developers focusing on development of cloud native application which will not just run perfectly on cloud but will excel in each space and will be efficient, resilient and scalable on cloud.
Microsoft Azure Review
- The possibility to link github repositories in deployments slots
- Use of staging slots to deploy a web application with zero downtime
- Datacenter in Brazil
- The user interface works slowly on moderns browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
- In some cases, it is hard to find what we want in the user interface.
- Sometimes terminating (shutting down) a virtual machine does not succeed properly and the VM remains running in the background, billing it.
My first time working with a colour .... a hue of blue
- The interface is simple and mostly intuitive.
- Things are constantly updated and new functionality added quite often.
- There is a lot of help available either online or through direct contact with Microsoft.
- New features do not automatically replace old features. I see references to use the "old Azure portal" often in lab notes.
- Not all functionality works as described. Keeping up with documentation seems to be an issue.
- Features in the trial are not available everywhere - just from selected and biased locations - many trial components.
Journey with Azure
- Azure abstracts away a lot of the complexities, But that's all part of the natural transition to cloud computing, Applications have to be completely re-engineered to take advantage of the unique benefits offered by cloud computing, including the ability to scale and quickly ramp up performance.
- Putting an app on the Web allows remote access from nearly every conceivable point, and that means "every single component has to be strong. If one of your components is compromised, the others shouldn't fall down."
- Azure instances each include a fixed amount of storage but with AWS, you’ll need to purchase storage separately at an additional cost. That said, many IT pros agree that AWS storage is highly customizable to their needs which is a plus, but the pricing is not as straightforward as Azure.
- As with anything, there are a couple of potential cons with Microsoft Azure. Unlike SaaS platforms where the end-user is consuming information (for example, Office 365), IaaS (Azure) moves business’ compute power from your data center or office to the cloud. As with most cloud service providers, Azure needs to be expertly managed and maintained, which includes patching and server monitoring.
- Unlike local servers, Azure requires expertise to ensure all moving parts work together efficiently. A common mistake by business administrators that are not fully engaged in how well (or poorly) their cloud servers are operating is to over-provision cloud services. While a common mistake, on premise servers’ compute power does not translate equivocally in the cloud, potentially costing businesses thousands of dollars per year.
- Need to provide customized SAN storage attached to VMs like AWS
Microsoft Azure has a strong focus on security, following the standard security model of Detect, Assess, Diagnose, Stabilize and Close. Paired with strong cyber security controls, this model has allowed Azure to achieve multiple compliance certifications, all of which establish Azure as a leader in IaaS security. Not only is the platform protected, the end user is also covered with Azure. This multi-level of protection is essential as security threats continue to multiply daily across the globe, targeting end users and putting your business’ data at risk. Azure provides simple, user-friendly services for increased protection, such as multi-factor authentication and application password requirements.
Azure? More like Fantazure! ...okay, I'll leave.
- Customizability. Compared to other cloud providers, it's incredibly easy to make large, complex deployments rather quickly, and it gives you very granular control over every aspect of your deployment. Additionally, with PowerShell integration, you can do massive, system-wide changes via shell scripting.
- Stability. VM stability is excellent. We've been on them for over 2 years, and haven't had a single outage that affected us, and any time we've had downtime, it was due to mistakes on our end.
- Ease of use. Everything is really easy to find and configure. Fantastic UI.
- Support. Their support is exactly as you're used to with Microsoft. Difficult to get a hold of, and we've had issues with tickets being lost and issues not being solved in a timely manner.
advanced features such as load-balancing, high availability groups, web apps, serverless architecture (Azure Functions), other bleeding-edge features and excellent documentation.
It's Microsoft. It's Cloud. What else would you use?
- Azure has allowed us to provide a platform that is easily resellable both from a management perspective as well as having the Microsoft name behind it, which is typically a trusted name for companies.
- The billing platform is great for breaking down hosted solutions across multiple customers and the ability to geolocate servers through its multiple data centers allows for seamless service providing to customers around the US and internationally.
- Resource scalability is a very powerful feature allowing us to pay the bare minimum during low periods and instantly expand our processing capacity when needed.
- It is easy to spin up a new environment with the many different VMs available through the Azure marketplace.
- Cost. Azure is much more costly than other platforms but that comes as a tradeoff with features and functionality.
- The platform is easy to manage once configured and set up properly. The initial dive into the platform can be daunting for even the most seasoned Microsoft administrator.
Windows Azure - Futuristic Public Cloud
The reason to choose Azure was:
a) We can't afford to have any downtime of our application
b) At any point of time, user should need feel that application is behaving slow.
c) We would like to focus more on our line of business application instead of investing time in monitoring and deployment.
- Azure service fabric is a great platform if you have plan to use micro service framework.
- Azure Active directory is cool if you don't want to manage your own sts.
- New Azure management portal is much better than old one.
- Automating the build using ARM template is still not that state forward, we end up using power shell.
Needs Improvement: If you are not a Microsoft shop then there is still very little you can do here apart from using VM.
Great scalability. Server visibility to attackers needs improvement.
- Scalability: You can easily scale services and plans on the platform.
- Very easy to start with.
- I ran into some issues related to security: seems like Azure servers were being targeted by unidentified attackers. This is not Azure's fault on its own but it was trickier to fix due to the visibility Azure's servers have.
- Trying to replicate legacy environments (CentOS 4, PHP 5.1 and the such) is not a pleasant experience, Azure presented a handful of barriers doing so. Modern environments had no such obstacles.
- Use it to start a project from scratch or to deploy modern environments.
- Legacy Linux environments have difficulties to start and run smoothly.
Azure - PaaS to the rescue!
- Very well documented system.
- 95% of features can be managed via API, a CLI, a web and a PowerShell.
- For the money (even MSRP), featureset is very impressive and competitive.
- MS is iterating on features at an incredible pace.
- The constant iteration and improvement, while amazing, means that tools are never fully functional on initial delivery.
- Changes to the API, while they are accompanied with much warning, are annoying.
- Since Azure does not currently use live migration (i believe this is changing), when a host undergoes emergency maintenance, they may reboot your VM.
Moving in-house servers to the cloud with Azure
- Allows us to replicate our active directory to the cloud, giving us the ability to recover in the event of an issue with our local AD server.
- Allows us to quickly spin up new servers to test software and get projects moving.
- Has all the licenses and tools needed built right in so there are no extra fees... and you only pay for what you use so we can spin up a new server and grow it as needed.
- There is a lot of constant change with the interfaces and not all of the features are always available in the newest iteration of the portals. For some things we still need to log in to the old portal. Change is good and it's great to see it continually evolving but it's sometimes hard to keep up with all the changes and to know which version of the portal you need to be working in.
- It is dependent on your internet connection so if your current connection isn't fast, you could notice some lag and/or performance issues.
- Documentation is sometimes lacking.
We have some servers that we haven't moved as of yet though because of concerns over the speed of the connection (i.e. opening large CAD files over the connection).
Azure....It's a good thing!!
- Capacity on demand: only pay for the space you need
- Software licensing: It is cheaper to license and easier to license with cloud computing
- Ease of Use: It is so easy to stand up applications on the cloud. The abilities for speed are far beyond that of on-premise.
- Security: Although in reality it just a perceived issue that security is harder to manage in the cloud, the subject needs to be addressed and proven to not be a problem more often.
- Old School Thinking: One of the biggest hindrances to the process. There are still people who just can't get their heads around Azure.
Windows Azure cloud solution is cool.
- Windows Azure console was intuitive. Easy to pick up and start rolling the solution out.
- I like the fact that if you were previously familiar with Windows AD, this was all very easy to use to manage user access and grant privileges to specific products.
- Hassle free. For example, deploying a SQL servers were a cinch. There's no need to deal with prereq. especially if you want to quickly deploy and run dev tests etc.
- Security can always be improved. No matter what cloud product we use, security is always paramount to ensure the adoption of a cloud solution.
- A corporate infrastructure that can be managed offsite (i.e. mail servers, etc).
- Development and tests.
Easier to spin up VMs for your MySQL databases
- Azure makes it very easy to spin up new websites with the web apps, virtual machines, sql databases, and more.
- It's a great tool to test a prototype without committing to a hardware purchase.
- The interface for browsing the available cloud services is very easy to use.
- MySQL instances are provided by a third party. This is not covered by credit offered by programs like Microsoft BizSpark.
- Billing status, while not obfuscated, is not always easy to see or predict.
- Deleting a cloud instance can be cumbersome (and may take some time).
- Easy to deploy workloads with Visual Studio.
- Debugging is great with IntelliTrace integration.
- The ability to switch deployment slots makes going live to production easy and seamless.
- Setting up auto-scaling of instances isn't as nice and intuitive as AWS.
- Storage groups isn't necessarily difficult to work with, but it's more complex than it has to be.
- The two management portals (original and new) have disparate levels of functionality and is very confusing if you don't know which has what you are looking for. This will resolve it self in the distant future, but in a competitive space such as this it's a turn off compared to AWS.
It is well suited when subscribing to Microsoft solutions from the marketplace. It is also very strong from a development perspective and integration with Visual Studio 2010.
From a usability perspective... sad to say, but the interface is overwhelming for new users that just want to spin up virtual machines and making simple changes can throw errors on the screen. Changes take time to take effect, so its hard to zip around and do what you need to do.
Microsoft Azure- Infrastructure as a Service
- Taking advantage of resources in the cloud allows you to decrease your costs for building and expanding your on-premises resources.
- Knowing that security is one of the biggest concerns for companies considering a move to the cloud, Microsoft designed Azure with security in mind.
- With Azure, you can develop hybrid applications that allow your on-premises applications to use cloud services, such as the cloud database and storage services.
- SQL Agent itself is not supported on SQL Azure, so you cannot run jobs via the agent in the first place.
- SQL Reporting is another feature that costs extra in SQL Azure.