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
(967)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(76-88 of 88)Azure the Best PaaS solution out there
- Rapid Development: This allows for quick setup of servers and services.
- Mobile Services: Azure has everything to create awesome simple mobile services
- Performance: Azure Performance is exceptional and I have seen improvements of internal datacenters
- Billing: The Billing can be somewhat confusing and in some cases higher than Amazon and other cloud providers
- Debugging can be confusing at times
- IaaS: Is still not as strong as other providers
Windows Azure: Well Worth It!
- Windows Azure's scaling feature is really nice. It allows you to scale your instances up and down as load increases and decreases. This helps in reducing service costs.
- Windows Azure offers SQL Server as a service which eases the pains of standing up a new SQL environment when needed. These SQL services can be replicated easily when needed - data and all. No need to do the work manually anymore.
- Windows Azure offers many templates for standing up a virtual machine. You can select the operating system and the type of VM (SQL Server, Sharepoint, Puppet Labs, etc) and you will have your VM created in minutes.
- Windows Azure's BizTalk service could use much enhancement. It does provide you with the basics but if you need more customization with inbound and outbound, you will have to use BizTalk full-blown.
- Windows Azure could provide more insight into the details of a failure. Currently, you can view trace logs and data on the Windows Azure dashboard but there are other errors being captured that Microsoft does not show to the general user. You have to call a technician to get more details on errors.
- Windows Azure VPN's could use more enhancements as well. The wizard walks you through the setup but it is not very intuitive. Also, when you need to make changes to the VPN, you are limited unless you drop and recreate the VPN.
Azure Cost Benefit Analysis
- Scalability: Since Azure was set up with load balancing and scale in mind, its very easy to add more processing power to your business with just a few clicks and the monitoring reports give you excellent insight to evaluate if scaling is required.
- Management: Azure's service management portal is extremely user friendly and intuitive, but the best part for me as a developer is how integrated it is into our development tools. It gives you access to all key areas of your account including the compute instances and your SQL Azure database.
- Cost Management: Getting started with Azure is easy and low risk. Using the no-contract subscription and the low cost of the entry level systems, it was very easy for me to make the case that our company should try Azure. This was especially easy when you couple this low cost with powerful scalability should this new endeavor ramp up and gain traction.
- Typically, our systems need to do more than simply host a web site or run a worker. Giving us the ability to integrate management of these types of services from Visual Studio in the role configuration would greatly simplify this process.
- The earlier versions of Azure were of course lacking support in some key areas, and persistent storage in blobs was counter intuitive and difficult to manage. That said, with what seems to be an endless army of developers, support staff, technical writers, etc. Microsoft rarely misses opportunities to improve their services and Azure is no exception. Using the provided technical documentation and demo applications, working with persistent storage has because quite painless.
- Can you host the solution yourself? If your company has the manpower and resources to host and support servers, then this is typically going to be the less expensive path in the long term with a much higher up front setup cost. Azure is the right solution for anyone looking to offset high initial server cost in favor of low recurring monthly payments until the project begins to draw in revenue.
- Should you host the solution yourself? Hosting your own physical box requires a lot of planning and disaster recovery forethought which Azure takes out of the equation. Again, if your company lacks the resources/manpower to manage these tasks, Azure is the right solution for you.
- Is the projects success guaranteed? Even if your company does have the resources to host your own servers, Azure gets you to market faster than hosting your own box. If the project becomes successful, you can always fall back to local hosting and use Azure for disaster recovery.
- Load Balancing
- Scaling up or down depending on visitor traffic to web based system
- Ease of deployment to the Azure Cloud
- Quite a few hours of down times this past month (8 hours of down time)
- SSL Support still needs work
- Backup and restore of Azure SQL needs to be improved on
Changed our nerdy lives.
- The Quick provisioning of resources via VMM or Powershell script
- Create development servers for testing code and applications
- Create disaster recovery instances ready for DR Restores
- Spin up standalone SQL or IIS sites without the overhead of a full server
- Office 365 Azure AD single sign on into other cloud applications (CRM, ERP, etc)
- Make it cheaper. Apply Moore's law to the pricing structure.
Moving to the Microsoft Azure™ Cloud
- Easily scalable- You can adjust your resources as your customers grow
- Preview Portal is a one stop dashboard to your infrastructure, application and financial elements to your instances
- Worldwide locations to release your VM's where your customers are located
- Affordable - You can control your cost without investing in hardware or other resources
- Up to last week, I could have mentioned couple of shortfalls but they were all released with the new portal. Now I can easily see my estimated expenditure with each VM's individually
Cloud Cover with Azure
- Easy to use identity providers such as Facebook, Google.
- High availability
- Ability to target regions of the world
- Better UI
- PAAS: we are a Microsoft shop so there were some benefits for us in the offering from a platform standpoint
- Reduction in CapEx expenditures for servers, data center environments
- Reduction in Expenses for warranty, maintenance, etc.
- Greatly reduced provisiing cycle for server assets
- Built in disaster recovery
- Lays the foundation for continuous deployment of software changes without bring down te application service (SaaS)
- Bandwidth. It's internet based access . . . . .
- Can't really have dedicated links to Azure so that is a little unsettling from a reliability and QoS (Quality of Service) standpoint.
- No a silver bullet. You will need to really analyze your applications and determine which ones are best suited for this offering. Still plan on hybrid cloud architecture.
- Data costs: when you really crunch the numbers you can spend a lot for data retrieval/storage depending on the scenario. Pay attention to your data flows and retention.
Azure Easy to Use
- Up time. We have experienced little to no down time while using Azure. It's been very reliable.
- The user experience in the Azure portal is very easy to understand and use. I had never used it before this project, and now i consider myself almost an expert.
- The API. We've been able to seamlessly integrate our application into the Azure storage API with the help of great documentation.
- The big thing for us was a Database Backup service, which is now in Beta. We've been using redgate cloud services, which is an extra price.
- Trying to use SSRS with an SSL cert on a virtual machine was nearly impossible. We have to install custom certs on each machine that accesses the SSRS VM, which is a pain point.
Azure review by cloud architect
- Quickly provision networks, virtual machines, SQL services and other resources.
- Provide a sandbox environment for development
- Use Azure as your disaster recovery site
- Load balancing isn't always as simple to use as it needs to be for some environments. This is being corrected with the Internal Load Balancing features of Azure.
- Ability to provide multi-site VPNs wasn't available but I hear that is changing as well
- More granular control to assign permissions thru the portal
Use of Azure in a non-technology company
- Security - As a company we are being constantly bombarded from foreign targets trying to compromise our systems. Putting Azure in place allows for us to put another layer between us and the 'bad guys'.
- Offloading - Being able to offload our workload from our Internet connections at the main office allows for us to not worry about the bandwidth constraints but rather the strategic use of whatever project is being deployed.
- Development - Our developers use Azure to do test/dev because of the ease of use as well as the sandboxing experience it provides.
- Portal - There are times where the portal isn't as intuitive as one might expect, have a searchable area for what you are looking for would be helpful.
- Licensing - Azure has a lot of value but by comparison to other Microsoft products it is still in its infancy and as such its cost should be reflective as such.
If you are a .Net development shop, look no further. Solid services, constantly being improved and made cheaper.
I used an Azure SQL Database for the website's membership (login) data. Again, worked great.
I configured the SQL Database for weekly automatic export to an Azure Storage account for backup purposes. The export ran without issue 99.999% of the time. There were a couple instances, over the course of a couple years, in which the export failed and I received an email to this effect. In these cases, I went into the Azure portal and reran the export manually.
I used Azure Service Bus Queues to queue email jobs. Email jobs were generated by the website when users used a "send invitation" function to email an invite to friends. Email jobs were also generated by a separate back end process that ran on-premises, and not on Azure. Another on-premises back end process pulled the email jobs from the Azure Service Bus queue and sent out the emails. The Azure Service Bus queue worked great and was very solid. The Service Bus Queue API used to enqueue and dequeue jobs took a little time to understand, but beyond the learning curve, I had no problems with it. Very solid.
I would highly recommend Azure. Besides the solid performance of the services that I used, they are constantly pushing prices down, evolving the existing services, and rolling out new services. New announcements of lower prices and service improvements come nearly every two weeks. It is a very impressive operation, top to bottom, from the physical data centers to the website portal that you use to interact and configure your services.
- Competitive and aggressive pricing
- Constantly evolving and improving services
- If you are a .Net shop, it fits you hand-in-glove
- I'd use more services if they cost even less than they do
- Some services are confusing and difficult to understand, such as Web Roles and Web Workers. Sometimes I wonder if I should/could be using these, but I don't quite understand them.
Windows Azure for Function as a Service
- Azure table storage has worked well for eventual consistency problems.
- Multi-tenant compute and data architecture was simple and intuitive
- Mechanism & Patterns to access Storage Queues have worked well for our multi-system (owned and operated by independent teams).
- Java support for worker role was satisfactory & helped us develop the overall architecture without needing to make adjustments.
- All the Java Application Servers that we analyzed for the solution were supported allowing us to test out models.
- Data management tools though third party were satisfactory
- Deployment was complicated with a lot of data (including SDK and Application Server) to be moved.
- Support for global distributed transactions through the platform for message oriented middleware was not found.