Microsoft Azure

Our Consulting Firm uses Azure for clients on specific projects. Azure is an excellent Cloud solution that helps offset the cost of development by allowing rapid setup and deployment. It also help provide enterprise cloud solutions. As we work with companies to develop new ideas and better infrastructure cloud is often an excellent choice to improve quality and mobile access in particular.

Windows Azure is being used by numerous departments in our organization. It is being used in many different forms. It is used as a data transport between clients and as service apps for teams. It is also being used as a Virtual Private Network and to implement Single Sign On.

We were looking to expand our operations adding new functionality which would cause tremendous strain on our existing servers. The web and worker roles were the perfect solution, allowing us to develop a front end application tied to SQL Azure and an Azure Service bus which would relay data and messages to the back end worker role. The processing jobs could take over 10 hours of hard computing, so off loading this work was imperative. Azure gave us an inexpensive, robust, and immediately scalable solution to make this happen.

We use Windows Azure for several customer facing websites, as well as our internal users.

Our whole organization uses Azure. We have set it up to automate the build of test environments for deploying code for clients as well as set up instances of our infrastructure on the cloud. Azure has also become part of our DR plan as it is a great place to restore cloud backups of critical infrastructure VMs and get back up and running very quickly. Our developers love it, our Infrastructure consultants love it, our organization is having a ball with it. Prices are also very competitive as it is cheaper than Amazon.

We moved our entire SCM4Good platform and the SCM4Hunger Warehouse Management module to the Microsoft Azure Cloud. This provides important gains in performance, reliability, and redundancy. In particular, Microsoft’s Content Delivery Network, with nodes in more than 16 countries worldwide, closes the distance for many of our developing country users in terms of Internet geography, and has given noticeable response-time improvements. Nathan Au, Project Manager for FareShare Brighton and Hove noted: “We use Aidmatrix’ SCM4Hunger to help receive, warehouse and dispatch food to our hunger agencies every day. We know we run high transaction volumes, especially during peak times each week. When Aidmatrix moved to the Microsoft Azure Cloud it was like night and day for us. We saw dramatic performance improvement in response times on average of 4x faster, in some situations it went as high as 10x. It’s amazing what a difference running the same application on the Azure Cloud can make. Now we can focus that much more time on getting food to those who are hungry.”

Windows Azure is being used to host a QR Code application in the cloud.

Looking at lower costs alternatives to maintaining our own data center assets for our commercial buisness applications.

We currently use Windows Azure to support a client's new business intake and support infrastructure. Right now, just the development team is directly working with Azure, but many members of the client are using the products we've developed in Azure. The new system we have developed is replacing a VB6 legacy app that will eventually be phased out.

We currently use Azure internally at our organization as well as provide implementation services for other companies. It is a great solution to extend your datacenter out to the cloud and spin up infrastructure as demand increases without investing in the hardware, software and technical skills normally needed for on-prem infrastructure.

Windows Azure is a product that helps us quickly and easily deploy various products. Anything from IaaS to SaaS to PaaS products are all used and Azure is always in the mix as it provides a secure and effective way of provisioning the necessary technology. Whenever we think of a new project we think of Azure in the realm of possibilities.

I used Azure Websites for my service's ASP.Net MVC website. I published the website from Visual Studio 2012 & 2013 and it worked like a charm.

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.

Windows Azure is being used as a vehicle for implementing Function as a Service in various capacities. We find that this is an excellent vehicle to implement single purpose functions (both from a cost and simplicity standpoint) that can then be scaled up and out. We are currently using this model to integrate between an on premise PeopleSoft installation with a mobile platform for work order management and related activities. We find that this provides the field users better and accurate up to date information compared to a timed push model.