Let's talk about VMs
April 05, 2022

Let's talk about VMs

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Azure Virtual Machines

We use Azure VMs for 2 main reasons. The first one, is when we need to do a lift&shift from on-prem to the cloud, where the main purpose is to migrate a system as-is to the cloud before restructuring it. The second reason, is for specific needs where we can't solely rely on PaaS or SaaS services, and we need to have the flexibility provided by a lower level IaaS VM

Pros

  • Many presets are available when spinning up a new instances to match you workload, instead of having to start from scratch
  • VM Scale sets makes it really easy to scale in & out the VMs easily
  • When getting started, no need to manage a networking layer before starting a new instance, no need for any VPC complexitites, as Azure handles it.
  • VM Firewall and security rules can be managed directly from the Azure interface

Cons

  • Slightly more expensive that other cloud provider VMs
  • The spin up time is a little longer as well. Even a few seconds count when you need to scale up quickly
  • Lacking choices when choosing Linux based OS images
  • It's so easy to spin up new instances, that it becomes also to easy to have to many of them to manage. Many teams end up with a couple of hundreds of VMs after a short while, making the whole thing very hard to maneuver
  • Azure VMs are the next step for us to rely on Onprem servers, and leaving the management of the infrastructure to the professionals
  • The ease of use, is also important when our main focus is to deliver new applications and integrations fast, and not having to worry about infrastructure. We sell bottles, not CPUs
We use both Azure and AWS VM services currently. AWS' EC2s have been around for longer an offer a much more reliable Linux OS support. But the gap getting smaller by the day, and Azure VMs are catching up nicely. In our case, we use a lot AWS for Linux-based applications running with Docker. And we use Azure VMs for anything related to Microsoft, and on prem migration to cloud where we need to have Windows support.

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?

No

Did implementation of Azure Virtual Machines go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Azure Virtual Machines again?

Yes

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Fargate, Amazon CloudFront
We tend to use as much App Services, and Serverless as we can. But what those win in ease of use and efficiency, they lack in flexibility. Many workloads cannot run on those services. Especially when you need heavy and time-consuming computing. Azure Virtual Machines on the other hand, give you anything you need in terms of flexibility, since you have access to the underlying OS, and for the fraction of the price. But as always, it's a tradoff, since you also need to manage, reboot, maintain, and patch those VMs

Azure Virtual Machines Feature Ratings

Server Virtualization
6.0
Virtual machine automated provisioning
7
Management console
7
Live virtual machine backup
6
Live virtual machine migration
4
Hypervisor-level security
6

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