Item: Microsoft Azure
Rating: 10
Author: Brandon Holbrook

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Azure

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization is spread across the globe. Putting our servers in Azure has enabled us to offer high availability to our customers and development department.

Pros and Cons

Pros

High Availability
Ease of use
Hybrid cloud

Cons

Technical Support
Open source features are lacking
Documentation

Return on Investment

As with any IaaS DO NOT lift and shift into Azure. Develop with the cloud model in mind. We were told to lift and shift into Azure with a crazy increase in operating costs.
Our development teams love it. Integration with Team City and Visual studio is one of the greatest time savers for our dev teams.
We thought we'd save on getting rid of some on premise appliances but we ended up needing the cloud version of the appliance because the features in Azure were just not mature enough yet.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Web Services

Integration with other Microsoft products makes Azure stand out quite a bit. But if your shop mostly runs open source and Linux then look at AWS or Google Cloud.

Support Rating

This is for sure an area where Azure could work on. We've had issues that not even their high level support techs could give us an answer to. Documentation could use some work.

Other Software Used

Microsoft System Center, Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) for Endpoints, Darktrace

If you're running Windows Server and Active Directory then Azure is the right move. The integration that Azure provides with their other products in the Microsoft ecosystem is one of their greatest strengths. If you are heavy on open source products and operating systems then consider another option.

Using Microsoft Azure

Usability

Azure is intuitive. The GUI takes little effort to get used to. There's some work that still needs to be done to get it better but right now it's pretty good. Windows shop users will find it very easy to use with their existing ecosystem but Linux users will be frustrated with the lack of features.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Azure, great for those looking to get to the cloud.