Item: Azure Virtual Machines
Rating: 6
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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 and Cons

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

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

Return on Investment

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

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Google Compute Engine

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.

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?

Did implementation of Azure Virtual Machines go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Azure Virtual Machines again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Fargate, Amazon CloudFront

Likelihood to Recommend

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

Let's talk about VMs

Overall Satisfaction with Azure Virtual Machines