Item: Microsoft Azure
Rating: 8
Author: Pedram Soheil

Overall Satisfaction with Windows Azure

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Windows Azure for several customer facing websites, as well as our internal users.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Load Balancing
Scaling up or down depending on visitor traffic to web based system
Ease of deployment to the Azure Cloud

Cons

Quite a few hours of down times this past month (8 hours of down time)
SSL Support still needs work
Backup and restore of Azure SQL needs to be improved on

Return on Investment

Reduces the need to manage hardware
Less frequent backups needed

Likelihood to Recommend

The main question to ask yourself is can you live with down time or not.

Using Windows Azure

3 - We maintain our windows azure servers by utilizing a network administrator, a database administrator and a custom application developer or deployment specialist.You could however potentially only have a single person be in charge of Windows Azure as the administrative dashboard is quite intuitive and makes most deployment and maintenance tasks as easy as 1,2,3!

Likelihood to Renew

The benefits of using Windows and SQL Azure far outweigh the disadvantages.

Comments

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Why you should or should not use Windows Azure for your organization