Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Azure
Azure is Microsoft's equivalent to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, etc. From a technical perspective, these providers are largely interchangeable in my experience. We primarily used Azure Compute, which let us spin up VMs in the cloud, to host our production and development Kubernetes clusters. We also used Azure VMs to host our production database - MongoDB.
- Azure Functions is the easiest serverless service to work with in my experience. Easy to ship Node.js functions without bundling dependencies.
- Proactive and responsive support. We've worked with most other cloud providers - Amazon, Google, Oracle. Amazon Web Services' customer support is a black hole and their documentation is worthless. Google and Oracle are better, but Azure's support is responsive and their docs are pretty good.
- Azure's Web UI is pretty easy to work with
- In our experience, Azure Kubernetes Survice was difficult to set up, which is why we used Kubernetes on top of VMs.
- Azure REST API is a bit difficult to use, which made it difficult for us to automate our interactions with Azure.
- Azure's Web UI does a good job of showing metrics on individual VMs, but it would be great if there was a way to show certain metrics from multiple VMs on one dashboard. For example, hard drive usage on our database VMs.
- For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
- DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
- Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.
The most common alternatives are Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. AWS is known for its non-existent customer support and abysmal documentation - Azure is clearly better on both fronts. Google Cloud Platform is a solid product, but in my experience Azure Functions is generally better than Google Cloud Functions.
Do you think Microsoft Azure delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Microsoft Azure's feature set?
Yes
Did Microsoft Azure live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Microsoft Azure go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Microsoft Azure again?
Yes