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Great for Developers but Two management portals makes me want to break the screen
Updated October 16, 2015

Great for Developers but Two management portals makes me want to break the screen

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

Overall Satisfaction with Windows Azure

We implement a cloud management platform and Windows Azure is one of the many cloud providers we integrate with. We deploy custom workloads to be provisioned which also integrate with configuration management solutions such as Puppet. It is used within our department only for testing and our clients use it for development workloads.
  • Easy to deploy workloads with Visual Studio.
  • Debugging is great with IntelliTrace integration.
  • The ability to switch deployment slots makes going live to production easy and seamless.
  • Setting up auto-scaling of instances isn't as nice and intuitive as AWS.
  • Storage groups isn't necessarily difficult to work with, but it's more complex than it has to be.
  • The two management portals (original and new) have disparate levels of functionality and is very confusing if you don't know which has what you are looking for. This will resolve it self in the distant future, but in a competitive space such as this it's a turn off compared to AWS.
  • It's been overall positive to work with in test environments.
Windows Azure shines from a development perspective.

It is well suited when subscribing to Microsoft solutions from the marketplace. It is also very strong from a development perspective and integration with Visual Studio 2010.

From a usability perspective... sad to say, but the interface is overwhelming for new users that just want to spin up virtual machines and making simple changes can throw errors on the screen. Changes take time to take effect, so its hard to zip around and do what you need to do.

Microsoft Azure Feature Ratings

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
8.6
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
9
Dynamic scaling
8
Elastic load balancing
7
Pre-configured templates
10
Monitoring tools
9
Pre-defined machine images
10
Operating system support
8
Security controls
8

Using Windows Azure

30 - Professional services / consulting
30 - Architects and engineers
  • Storage
  • Virtual machines
  • Site to site vpn
  • Cloud management platform integration
  • Templating workloads
  • Writing custom integrations for RDS using our SDK
It works great for the clients that use it.

Evaluating Windows Azure and Competitors

  • Product Features
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor
I'd compare the products from different end user perspectives as a second phase.

Using Windows Azure

There are much needed improvements to the new portal. It's getting there, but until everything is transitioned over it's going to be painful.
ProsCons
Well integrated
Feel confident using
Unnecessarily complex
Difficult to use
Requires technical support
Inconsistent
Slow to learn
Cumbersome
Lots to learn
  • starting virtual machines isn't all that difficult, if that's all you are looking to do without adding network complexity and tiers
  • Features that are stuck in limbo between the original portal and the new portal. very confusing and requires back and forth troubleshooting if you aren't familiar