Azure review by cloud architect
Overall Satisfaction with Windows Azure
We currently use Azure internally at our organization as well as provide implementation services for other companies. It is a great solution to extend your datacenter out to the cloud and spin up infrastructure as demand increases without investing in the hardware, software and technical skills normally needed for on-prem infrastructure.
- Quickly provision networks, virtual machines, SQL services and other resources.
- Provide a sandbox environment for development
- Use Azure as your disaster recovery site
- Load balancing isn't always as simple to use as it needs to be for some environments. This is being corrected with the Internal Load Balancing features of Azure.
- Ability to provide multi-site VPNs wasn't available but I hear that is changing as well
- More granular control to assign permissions thru the portal
- Decreased the time and effort required to provision new infrastructure.
- Disaster recovery scenarios are more cost effective to create since a new datacenter is not required
Pricing is comparable to Amazon. Microsoft is highly vested in matching their services as well. Ease of use is extremely important and Azure excels with this.