Item: Azure Virtual Machines
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Azure Virtual Machines serve the use case of when we need virtual machines that are running on the Microsoft Azure Cloud. We are a multi-cloud provider and therefore it's critical for our business value proposition to offer our services on multiple major cloud versions. When you are in the Azure cloud already, Azure Virtual Machines are the only sensible choice of virtual machines.

Pros and Cons

It's relatively easy to set up Azure Virtual Machines within the console.
Azure Virtual Machines exist in the Azure ecosystem so you have access to other Azure services.
Azure customer support has been responsive to our needs.

Pricing can be a concern if you are truly agnostic to which cloud you are building your particular solution in.
The UI, as is the case with any cloud provider, is crowded.
As with any cloud provider, it can be difficult to tune in exactly the right amount of servers for your needs...you might find yourself under/overprovisioning.

Return on Investment

It has met our VM needs for our Microsoft Azure offering.
It required a sensible ramp-up time that was not an impediment to our business initiatives.
Azure is a fully enough featured ecosystem for us to accomplish our goals around the VMs.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

More or less these are comparable offerings in my opinion as a user of both the AWS and Azure Clouds in a business environment in which there's a use case for a multi-cloud environment. We were able to complete a feature parody between the Azure Cloud and AWS Cloud for key offerings that rely on Virtual Machines.

Key Insights

Do you think Azure Virtual Machines delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Azure Virtual Machines's feature set?

Yes

Did Azure Virtual Machines live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Azure Virtual Machines go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Azure Virtual Machines again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Azure Backup

Likelihood to Recommend

I would recommend Azure Virtual Machines to anyone who has a business case for building their solutions in Azure. There are reasonable arguments to be made in favor of more stateless architectures for certain use cases, but if you are planning to use virtual machines and are in Azure this is your only option. There are different reasons why one might have a business use case for building in Azure. There are various technical reasons for choosing VMs.

Azure Virtual Machines are perfectly serviceable

Overall Satisfaction with Azure Virtual Machines