Azure Resource Manager Reviews

In dealing with something like Site Recovery or Azure Bastion or Azure AI Foundry, we are having a very minimal type of implementation that is only four nodes. Microsoft Azure Resource Manager is being used for provisioning.

My experience with Azure Resource Manager is fantastic. It provides me with a complete landscape of Azure Stack Hub. I have complete visibility and can see what resources it has regarding compute, network, storage, security, and which IPs it has consumed, all of which I can visualize.

Azure Resource Manager's Role-Based Access Control and ARM tagging features are excellent. Azure Stack Hub is very compliant with CSA, Q-Cert, 27107, and 27018. This is fantastic when it comes to data sovereignty and private cloud offering.

I assess Azure Resource Manager's integration with Azure's ecosystem as very helpful because it gives us unification across all cornerstones such as network, compute, storage, and security.

Azure Resource Manager can be improved in several ways. It should support heterogeneous cloud integration. For example, if I have a cloud management portal from a private cloud provider such as Morpheus from HPE or other private cloud portals, and Azure Resource Manager could integrate with other clouds to give us unified resource utilization or management, that would be really good. Currently, it supports only Microsoft to Microsoft backend and does not support heterogeneous environments; it only supports homogeneous ones.

Looking towards the future, I would like to see additional features or improvements in Azure Resource Manager because nowadays companies are going with a multi-cloud model. I am looking for unification of other clouds inside Azure Resource Manager.

I have been working in this field for over four years.

When it comes to rating technical support from one to ten, Azure Stack Hub's support in Saudi Arabia is not that good. Globally, support is available, but it takes time because first we need to contact the hardware vendor. The hardware vendor will assess what type of support we have with regards to whether it is software-based, and then the backend connects to Microsoft support. If it is firmware-related, Microsoft will not be directly involved in support; it comes through the hardware vendor. The validated hardware vendors are HPE, Cisco, Supermicro, and Dell. Support comes indirectly through these vendors. The first point of contact is Dell, which is the hardware vendor, and then Dell will engage the backend with the Microsoft engineer. It depends upon the severity. Since there is no direct support contact with Microsoft and it has to go through the hardware vendor, support takes time due to the genuine reason that Microsoft states if there is firmware, firmware and software need to be synced and validated with regards to which patches are required. They have their own standards.

Neutral

About the pricing, it is expensive. Maintaining Azure Stack Hub is not easy because it is expensive, though it depends on customer to customer. If the customer is looking for a secure, compliant cloud, I really recommend Azure Resource Manager. However, as a provider, I am looking for complete unification with all multi-cloud in the backend. I want to have consolidation of all cloud systems. The challenge is that Microsoft does not provide any plugins to integrate with any other cloud.

When it comes to using declarative templates, I want to clarify that I am talking about Azure Stack Hub, not Microsoft Azure. Microsoft Azure is a public offering, while Azure Stack Hub is a private cloud from Microsoft and is a connected model. It is similar to Microsoft Azure. We have Azure Resource Manager and we are using it to create templates, build up the templates, and publish them in the marketplace.

Audit trails have helped me maintain compliance. We have regular audits every year. We are a cloud certified company and we are always having Azure Stack Hub to maintain cloud certifications, 27017 and 27018.

I would recommend Azure Resource Manager to others. I would rate this review an eight out of ten.

I am asking about the main use cases for Azure Resource Manager, which is to manage resources and provide a single link to view all services in a particular resource group.

Azure Resource Manager manages the complete control of resources with the help of PowerShell or Terraform commands.

It consolidates all the services, and we can apply the RBAC policies on that particular resource group for access point of view and in terms of billing, justifying the per resource group billing, which we can also communicate to the customer.

The Azure Resource Manager is complete, where we can manage all the resources. It is very easy to deploy the Azure Resource Manager.

I do not face any challenges for the deployment part, and I personally take part in the deployment process.

All the resources configured under Azure Resource Manager are a scalable model.

The benefit of Azure Resource Manager is the complete deployment with the help of templates in that particular resource group, along with applying role-based or access control policies and tagging resources for identification.

It totally depends on Microsoft, and I am not the concerned person for Microsoft to amend the services.

Microsoft involves the Copilot for Azure, which also gives benefits to the customer. There are multiple services which Microsoft implements on the Azure side, and I hope we will get better solutions.

They should focus more on AI features such as Copilot.

I have been working with Azure Resource Manager for three to four years.

I do not face any challenges for the deployment part.

I personally take part in the deployment process.

It is pretty much stable.

All the resources configured under Azure Resource Manager are a scalable model.

I rate Microsoft's technical support for Azure Resource Manager as approximately eight.

Positive

I am doing only Azure services; I do not do AWS.

I have not purchased Azure Resource Manager through the AWS Marketplace.

I have three to four engineers who help me with deployments.

We are doing deployment with the help of ARM or Terraform templates for smooth deployment.

I deploy Azure Resource Manager and the resources with the help of the Azure Portal or PowerShell.

Regarding licensing costs, if we talk about the Azure license or the subscription-based license offered separately by Microsoft, there is a huge difference, as the Azure pay-as-you-go model lets users stop services anytime and they can charge based on utilization.

For a core-based license in Azure, it is approximately 11,000, while separate licenses procured from Microsoft with software assurance are about 22 or 25,000 per year, showing the difference but still adhering to the pay-as-you-go model.

Regarding licensing costs, if we talk about the Azure license or the subscription-based license offered separately by Microsoft, there is a huge difference, as the Azure pay-as-you-go model lets users stop services anytime and they can charge based on utilization.

For a core-based license in Azure, it is approximately 11,000, while separate licenses procured from Microsoft with software assurance are about 22 or 25,000 per year, showing the difference but still adhering to the pay-as-you-go model.

I am doing only Azure services; I do not do AWS.

I know what the role and responsibility we take regarding the Data Box, but as of now we do not provide the solution to the end customer.

We only do the cases where the data size is not high. Wherever the data size would be huge, such as 5 TB or 10 TB, then we might require the Data Box or Data Disk to transfer the data from their on-prem server to the Azure Cloud.

I personally take part in deployments. The time I spend on deployment of Azure Resource Manager totally depends on the commercial shared with the customers and how many resources are there. Based on that, we can configure different resource groups.

It takes no longer than an hour or two hours. We configure the separate resource group if we have multiple deployment plans for the UAT or production.

I have not found any weak points against Azure Resource Manager as of now.

The RBAC policies provide the end customer access as per their requirement, whether contributor access, admin access, or read-only access, which can be defined in the policy assignment, enabling user access based on the assigned policies.

I employ access control and tagging capabilities. I talk about access control specifically for the storage account, where we provide access control to the particular user with read and write access policies that we apply in the portal based on those policies users can only access what they are assigned.

We do not do the compliance management activity with the help of ARM or Terraform; we only use the template for resource deployment manually for policy assignment.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Azure Resource Manager a 10.

I have plans to build my own solutions on the cloud in the near future. I thought Azure is a little easy to learn and then provision different services. I have chosen the platform to explore it.

I have studied several services. Azure Resource Manager is the one that I chose. In order to be predefined, Azure Resource Manage means, in most banks and financial services, a particular service with a particular configuration, with a particular security, and its governance policies need to be provisioned. You can define templates, and by standardizing those templates, you can start provisioning the service, which will help you conform to the organization's policies and governance, which I like about the Azure Resource Manager.

The most valuable feature of the solution is Azure Blueprints. With Azure Blueprints, you can define a template. The tool helps where you can define or where you can incorporate your policies and identities along with resource groups. You can also provide options to accept the inputs. There are a few things that the tool should allow you to customize according to your needs. I may want to use Bob as an administrator, while someone else wants to use Alice as an administrator. Prompting that user input while executing that template is what I mean when I say input. I found the tool's look helpful in minimizing your rescan compliance.

I have not reached a level where I can provide input on improving the tool. I need to study other cloud services, and then only I can comment on how Azure differs from others.

At a group level, if I apply a policy, it gets cascaded to all the resources underneath it, but it is not possible when it comes to tags. When I apply tags at a group level, it should go to the resource under it.

I have been using Azure Resource Manager for four months. I am an individual user.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. The tool is always reliable, so I can confidently set up my services. I can rely on particular features in the tool for whatever purpose is needed, like arranging, billing, segregation, compliance, and policies.

Scalability is not applicable to the tool since it is used for logical grouping. It is just how you navigate, so it is a management feature for grouping in a good manner so that we can apply security governance based on that group's requirements. It is about arranging things, so scalability is not a feature.

I haven't yet reached out to the solution's technical support. I just use Google to get answers to all my questions linked with the tool.

If one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the product's initial setup phase as a nine out of ten.

The product's initial setup phase was easy, as the documentation and information were very good.

The solution is deployed using Azure cloud services.

The solution can be deployed in just a few clicks.

I deployed the tool alone in my company.

Microsoft is known for being user-friendly. It was the first time I started studying cloud solutions and services. I thought it would be good and easy to use as the time needed to wrap up or invest in the learning curve would be easy to manage.

As I am into banking services, I work for a bank where the tool plays a critical role. People cannot just configure the tool the way they want, as it is a public cloud. There are some risks and compliance needs that need to be followed. Whatever the templates get approved by the governance and risk team, the provisioning team or deployment team should be easily able to select the template without any hassle and then start provisioning the service according to the requirements.

The tool's most beneficial feature for managing resources revolves around how we can define the hierarchy and how that will help us manage different things. For example, if you want to apply a policy on a particular resource manager, you can do that. With Azure Resource Manager level, you can just apply it, and it will be cascaded to all the areas below in the hierarchy. If you want a breakup, cost at a hierarchy level. For example, you can define for a group or a particular team that these are the resources, or you can decide which part is only for storage and which part is particularly for VMs, allowing you to organize it all in different ways. You can implement your policies, and you can easily apply them to the intended groups or set of resources and monitor the costs at a resource group level.

I don't see anything is required when it comes to the maintenance part as it is for logical grouping and setting up of templates. There is nothing like maintenance needed. There is nothing like billing for it, so there is no maintenance involved.

My company uses other cloud services as well, while Azure Resource Manager is used by me. Corporate needs are different. I don't have much insight into it to be able to comment on it. I spoke about my own experience with the tool. I would like to set up my own product in the cloud environment soon, and that is how the journey started.

I recommend others to use the tool.

The tool is helpful for grouping features. With Azure Blueprint lines, it is good for governance and compliance and Azure Resource Manager is really handy for those who are very security and risk conscious.

The tool was not used to support any AI-driven projects.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We use Azure Resource Manager in all of our environments. For Azure DevOps and Azure deployments, we use ARM templates. We use different tools for the AWS platform.

ARM templates make parameterizing and using variables in your DevOps pipeline easy. Thanks to the properties parameter, these templates provide a straightforward way to organize your code, which allows you to initialize additional features for specific services. You can also modify the ARM template code, simplifying new deployments and managing releases. ARM templates offer significant flexibility and ease of use.

Compared to ARM templates, Terraform is often preferred because it is more versatile and user-friendly. With Terraform, you can create a single, generic script that works across multiple cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and even Oracle Cloud. This eliminates the need to write separate scripts for each platform. 

ARM templates are specifically designed for use with Microsoft Azure and cannot be used with other platforms. In contrast, Terraform supports multiple cloud platforms, allowing you to easily provision VMs and other resources across different environments like AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle Cloud. It gives you more feasibility. It gives you more features. It is very useful for multi-cloud management.

ARM templates should be enhanced to offer more flexibility and support new features. Ideally, they could be adapted for multi-cloud use. For example, if I write a template for Azure, I should be able to switch to AWS or GCP easily and have the same template create resources on those platforms. This would eliminate the need to write separate scripts for different clouds. If ARM templates were upgraded to support multi-cloud environments, our workflow would be greatly simplified.

I have been using Azure Resource Manager for six to seven years.

I created some high-priority tickets using level-one support. These were assigned to an agent who always helped me resolve the issue. 

Microsoft should offer quick chat support, especially for production environment issues. Currently, 24/7 support is only available for premium customers. If this level of support were extended to all customers, it would help us resolve issues faster. Creating a ticket takes time, and in production environments, SLAs are crucial. Since we work on the customer side, avoiding panic for our customers is always a top priority.

Neutral

Terraform offers multi-cloud management, a feature that Azure Resource Manager does not provide.

Deployment with Terraform is quicker and more efficient, which can save costs. You avoid the need for specialized experts and benefit from better resource optimization. 

Azure deployments are usually successful. However, I encounter issues when deploying ARM templates. These issues often arise due to regional failures or backend maintenance on Azure's side, causing the deployment to fail. Despite these occasional setbacks, my deployments generally run smoothly.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I am a DevOps engineer and I use the solution for the templates.

The most valuable feature is the vast resources available online. The solution is well documented in the API by Microsoft.

Unlike Terraform, Azure Resource Manager is hard to maintain and modularize and has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for over five years.

The solution is stable. Depending on the API, simply call in the rest of the Azure Resource Manager API and we will complete the provisioning.

The initial setup is straightforward. The difficulty arises when we need to provision something complex or sophisticated, as we then have to write a considerable amount of code.

The solution is open-source.

I give the solution a seven out of ten. There is no limit to what can be done with Azure Resource Manager Templates, as they are just APIs and are fully documented. However, they can be difficult to maintain.

I started using the solution because it was the only one to provision at the time.

We can use the solution in some cases, but it is not suitable for all projects. We must adhere to the requirements; for instance, Terraform is usually the preferred choice as it has the state, but there are times when Azure Resource Manager Template is more suitable as Terraform has limitations that Azure Resource Manager Template does not.

The use cases include migrating existing infrastructure to Azure, as well as migrating databases, updating cycles, running backups, creating components, providing ADA services, and offering a jump server, among other things.

Azure Resource Manager is extremely user-friendly and easy to deploy and understand. Furthermore, it does not require any specific prerequisites to be fulfilled.

The latency has room for improvement.

The cost has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for a couple of years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

The technical support is wonderful.

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment time depends on the size of the environment but on average it takes around one week.

We pay $15,000 to $20,000 a month for the service and it is worth the cost.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

Azure Resource Manager is the best option available and I recommend it to others.

Microsoft has a lot of products on the Microsoft Azure website. You can use it for data migration purposes. You have Azure Data Factory, AZCopy, Azure Storage, data lake services, and analytical services. Depending on the kind of migration, you can pick from any of those services. The combination of services also depends on the data, whose data you have, etc. Based on that combination, we create a solution for data integration.

In Azure Resource Manager, you can manage services in different projects, in different environments, and with different tenants. It helps us put the hierarchy in place. Based on the hierarchy, people will get the role and everything, and we can centrally control it.

If I have applications that require certain services like Azure Services, I can assign them. I have other web applications that require web-related applications, and I can segregate my users. I can segregate my team based on that. 

I haven't used Resource Management extensively to control access thoroughly. I don't try to code anything here. I'm mostly using the common functionalities and not anything else.

It has multiple benefits. On the management side, Azure Resource Manager helps with things like team management. It also helps on the expert side. It helps us manage projects and services centrally, and it's very useful.

There is room for improvement. They have so many roles and contributors, but we primarily use three categories or the main contributor and reader roles. They have created a lot of other roles, but they are still not efficient enough to use. If you just use one service like Azure Data Factory, they also offer separate services, but they aren't as efficient as their main three roles.

I would like Microsoft to at least work on that. For the last two years, I'm have been working on the services to try to come up with a different way or different control approach. But I have to use the three general roles like contribute, filter, and the reader.

We aren't able to use the service days in roles because it's not working properly. It's not integrated, and it gives some people or one person one service day role. It won't be easy for him or her to work. I see they have defined many roles, including individual roles, but they aren't as good as the three main roles they have defined in Resource Management. I think they can work on that. 

They have created multiple roles, but I would rather they simplify the roles they already have. The main goal is to work with efficient data. Their support could also be better.

I have worked with Azure Resource Manager over the last 12 months.

I'm not at all happy with their support. Over the years, whenever we raised an issue, we never got clear and understandable support. I have also read in other places that Microsoft support isn't good at all. The partner support is really pathetic. It takes a lot of time. Meanwhile, thanks to Google, we are able to find solutions.

The initial setup is straightforward, but we have to wait and see once we define the roles. There are hierarchy-based rules there, and I have to segregate them at the project level or for some other roles. 

We have to thoroughly test it before we roll out specific access to a person. There might be some understanding, but the documentation isn't right, or they don't have enough videos to create the rules and design that. It required some time to understand and create and test and do it ourselves.

We implemented it ourselves.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Azure Resource Manager a six.

Our primary use case of this solution is to provision cloud resources and resource groups for different kinds of projects as a support environment. We are partners of Azure and I'm a digital transformation architect and manager of digital.

The solution is user friendly and it's easy to manage reserve incentives and to automate resources. It's also simple to view and know what you're using. 

It would be helpful if they would create a common line within the user interface so that if you want to automate or scale a reserve deployment, it can be done simply. It would mean running directly from the resource manager or finding a way to automate without using a common line. 

I've been using this solution for 18 months. 

Microsoft has done lot to improve stability and to provide a good user experience.

We have access to technical support but don't really have the need for it. The documentation is great and if you have access to the partner portal which is also great, you can find almost everything in English.

We previously used Data Machines on our own data center but the company has moved everything to cloud so we no longer have a private data center.

The initial setup is not complex because it's already deployed. You don't have to do anything, just sign into the portal and view the resources from there.

We have a third party license. 

I know that the company evaluated Global Cloud, Microsoft and AWS, but I wasn't involved in that process. 

It's important to monitor costs. There are a lot of things that can be done to reduce the cost of the solution and it's easy to reduce the resources lying around. You have to monitor closely what you're using.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

Azure Resource Manager is used for the management functions. It is a part of the dashboard and the management solution. The customers use it to group and manage every kind of resource in Azure. You can see the information through the console and Azure Resource Manager. 

Our customers need to manage each resource. They need to know how a resource is used over a period of time. They need to start and use the timing mode to group the same kind of resources for assigning the codes to a specific project. Azure Resource Manager enables grouping of this kind of information so that the customers know how to deal with certain behaviors over time.

The features for managing the subscriptions and assigning a group of resources to a project team are the most valuable. 

They can maybe improve the interface.

I have been using Azure Resource Manager for two or three years.

It is stable.

I don't know if we had a need to scale it. Our customers are medium-sized and large-sized companies. 

We are using support for the cloud model. They have been okay. I would rate them an eight out of ten. They can provide multi-language support. Some of my customers don't speak English, and sometimes, they need to deal with English support, which is really complicated. 

It is easy. Customers have no problem with it. 

Azure Resource Manager is a part of the dashboard. It doesn't need deployment. You might need to adjust the configuration over time, but there is no deployment. It is a part of the management model of the cloud.

If customers are looking for this kind of management tool for monitoring, I would recommend it. I would rate Azure Resource Manager a ten out of ten.