Microsoft Azure Container Service Reviews

My main use cases for Microsoft Azure Container Service involve automating different infrastructure needs. Customers frequently ask to automate different environments using Terraform. They want to provision their different microservices over Microsoft Azure Container Service. I mostly use it to manage different microservices. We need to deploy on Azure AKS, Microsoft Azure Container Service mainly.

Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Services helps my development process by allowing us to deploy different microservices. We can very easily expose them, and we can serve different types of websites by using Kubernetes services.

Microsoft Azure Container Service includes being a very mature tool and a fully managed service, making it ready to use. You can simply opt for it and use it.

As a managed service, you don't need to take care of the managed components. You only need to take care of whatever user-space you are managing. All the managed components are taken care of by Microsoft. They provide support for different upgrade operations, and anything related to managed components such as the controller nodes, those things they can take care of automatically. This is actually a very challenging task that is handled by Microsoft itself.

Microsoft Azure Container Service has positively impacted my organization as it is a very mature tool and, when using the Azure platform, it's highly secure. It can offer end-to-end encryption and take care of all kinds of compliance. It also offers Azure Defender for Cloud that can provide security recommendations on a daily basis, making it a very mature product.

Microsoft Azure Container Service can improve if it can integrate current AI tools within the service, which would help us to fix the issues much faster. By default, AI can offer different chatbots. If it can run some particular agent on a certain service, it will do the analysis based upon the different events and accordingly propose some solutions. It would be beneficial if we can include or introduce some AI tools with our Azure products.

I have been using Microsoft Azure Container Service since 2018.

Microsoft Azure Container Service is very stable.

Microsoft Azure Container Service is very scalable. It can offer horizontal as well as vertical autoscaling. Both options are available, and you can scale horizontally as well as vertically very easily.

To evaluate customer service and technical support for Microsoft Azure Container Service, we need to review the entire customer infrastructure first. Based upon what application we can support the microservices, we can propose the solution and evaluate. If it is a monolithic application, we need to check if the customer is ready to go with microservices because they need to rewrite the entire application code. That is the first point we need to check.

We need to check the security part, what kind of application it is, and how the customer wants to host this application. Then we examine the security and compliance part. By default, Azure will offer everything authentication and authorization through Azure Entra ID. The network and security features include their internal firewall, Azure Cloud Defender, and Sentinel. Depending upon what the customer's current environment has, we can decide accordingly.

Positive

I did not previously use any different solution.

The initial setup of Microsoft Azure Container Service is straightforward. I need to decide what SKU size I want to use and what naming convention I want to apply, depending upon my project requirements, and then I can deploy it very easily.

I am able to deploy everything; I did not use any integrator, reseller, or consultant for deployment.

I have seen a return on investment with Microsoft Azure Container Service, as my investment is increasing day by day because it is a very mature product, and it is competing with all the different cloud providers such as Google and Amazon. It is mature enough to compete with others.

The experience with pricing for Microsoft Azure Container Service depends on the use case and current workload. Based upon that, it can offer different types of SKU sizes because under the hood it is using virtual machines that are based upon some SKUs. Depending upon the requirement, I need to choose the SKU size, and accordingly, my cost will be decided based on the workload being run.

The cost-effective features of Microsoft Azure Container Service help my organization with resource optimization because depending upon what services we're using, it reduces 40 to 50% of cost. Earlier, we needed to deploy our services on either virtual machines or bare-metal hardware. Now we are deploying those things over the Azure environment. Azure also offers RI instances (Reserved Instances) that can offer different cost benefits if you procure particular hardware for a couple of years. To take care of cost management, we can enable different alerts that warn you when reaching a particular defined cost limit. We can very easily manage it and take care of all kinds of costs.

I evaluated Google as well as Amazon before choosing Microsoft Azure Container Service.

The most significant differences between Microsoft Azure Container Service and other products are that Microsoft Azure Container Service is very mature and deployment is quite easy. With Google and Amazon, they have a different way of deployment and managing. The network component is a little bit tricky and different, but they are very mature, so you can either go with the GUI or CLI. It's very easy. It can bundle all the requirements into one place; you can opt for the monitoring solution, metric solution, and log analytic solution. In one place, you get everything.

The product I want to review is Microsoft Azure Container Service. I mostly use Terraform and Azure portal. I also use GitHub and GitHub Actions.

I use Microsoft Azure Container Service along with Azure DevOps.

Azure Monitor is a fully mature tool. At the backend, it uses numerous tools to capture different metrics. We have Azure Metrics to check the metrics. Performance Monitor can provide different kinds of graphs and dashboards. Through dashboards, we can visualize different monitoring metrics. It can also offer integration with Grafana, so we can easily integrate the Grafana tool.

I am using Azure Monitor for Microsoft Azure Container Service.

I mostly use Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Services.

The integration of Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Services with Azure DevOps services is quite easy. I rate it five out of five because it's a native tool for Microsoft, so we can very easily integrate it with Azure DevOps.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Microsoft Azure Container Service a 9.

We are a SaaS software company, so we use the solution for putting our product and then going back to customers.

Approximately 15 to 20 people are currently working with Microsoft Azure Container Service in my company.

We are a growing company, so mostly I think the usage grows year on year. We will be having more people and will be using more services.

The CI/CD capabilities are important because we do development. We use both development and production on Microsoft Azure.

The CI/CD capabilities help in the development process. For the technical side, I would need to get back to some of my programmers, but we use the complete Microsoft Azure side for all of our development work. The CI/CD helps in the complete process for our team.

As we move into the use of Microsoft Azure Container Service, it will make us more flexible and probably reduce our costs down the line. They can probably handle peak traffic and other things better than the older way of doing it.

Microsoft Azure Container Service helps to optimize resources and save costs by allowing our product to handle it through this containerization method. When there is not too much traffic, we will be able to bring it down to the minimum, which would give us good cost savings.

For our usage of Microsoft Azure Container Service, it is already helping us. For improvements, I don't have any recommendations currently because we have just gotten into it. What is available is good for the work we do.

Regarding monitoring tools in AKS, we use them and understand how the environments are working through the tools. We use those for analytics and scaling of the environments. They help us in all our environments, and we can look into them. As required, we can downscale, upscale, and perform other operations because of the available tools.

Better triggers around when we change or when we increase and decrease the environment would be helpful.

The cost of Microsoft Azure Container Service could be better. There are many programs that we need to go through and qualify to get better pricing.

I have been working with Microsoft Azure Container Service for more than one year now.

The initial setup of Microsoft Azure Container Service is technical. We have the right team, so it is manageable for us. We have been able to implement it successfully. With Microsoft support, if we get stuck at any time, we have good assistance.

I have not faced any problems or issues with the stability of Microsoft Azure Container Service. They are pretty stable.

I would call this solution scalable. It is easy to scale.

We have good support from Microsoft, but at times it is a little cumbersome.

We have looked at other tools before working with Microsoft Azure Container Service for container management. We have been mainly on Azure because it gives you a complete bouquet of tools where security and other things are available. We chose Microsoft over other players because of that reason for all of our development and production workloads. We were looking at others, but then you would have to use third-party tools. Microsoft has a bouquet that was helpful for us.

My use case for Microsoft Azure Container Service is for creating applications for internal use; it could be security-related or a service of some sort. The source code might be available in GitHub, and then I would publish the application securely to my internal customers.

The functions or features in Microsoft Azure Container Service that I find most valuable are the flexibility to deploy instantly, the monitoring of the applications, and the integration with Defender. I find security features and monitoring very useful. The main benefits Microsoft Azure Container Service provides for me are that it is easy to configure, easy to deploy, and functional. It definitely saves me money and time because it is all in one place, so that is also very positive.

Sometimes the integration could be better between the Azure environment; there is some tweaking needed when building Docker files and creating mount points, and it is not always that easy. From a GitHub source code environment, there can be vulnerabilities or hard-coded secrets that need addressing. If I configure my Docker image, I could still find issues in my source code that need fixing, so from that perspective, it is sometimes a bit cumbersome.

I have been working with Microsoft Azure Container Service for a year.

I would rate the stability of Microsoft Azure Container Service a ten.

The ability to scale and expand in Microsoft Azure Container Service is good, and I would also rate it a ten.

Technical support from Microsoft is very good; the way they have created support tickets integrated into the portal is really good, and I am really surprised with that. I am satisfied with the response time; it is usually within six to eight hours or so, which is still good as things are not so critical.

The initial setup process for Microsoft Azure Container Service is simple.

I have compared Microsoft Azure Container Service with a product from AWS. Comparing the two vendors, it is a bit complex because I do not have access in AWS and I cannot set up components or services there. But in Azure, I do have access, so I picked Azure to run the service.

I am using App Containers and Container Instances or Container Applications. I am using a Key Vault, and I am working with services like Azure File Storage, Azure Stack, and App Services, and I use App Container and Container Instances. I do use Azure Kubernetes Services for CI/CD capabilities. Regarding Azure Kubernetes Services integration with Azure DevOps Services, sometimes it could be complex, but it works fairly well with DevOps. I try to use Azure native monitoring for monitoring tools in AKS. Monitoring logs and so on work well for me. Some parts of my organization use extra tooling, for instance, DataDog or those kinds of monitoring services, but it is not really required.

When it comes to purchase processes for Microsoft solutions, I am directly working with the vendor. For pricing regarding Microsoft Azure Container Service, I would rate it a six, where one is high and ten is low. Sometimes the integration could be better between the Azure environment; there is some tweaking needed when building Docker files and creating mount points, and it is not always that easy. I would rate this review a nine overall.

The main use case for Microsoft Azure Container Service is applicable not for a particular service but across all areas, including sales, presales, and everywhere else for the processes I am using it.

Generally, we see that deployment is faster with Microsoft Azure Container Service, which is why I like it. Second, once we have a container, we are easily able to scale up, which is a key function of the product for my use case.

The main benefits that the solution provides are saving our time and saving our money.

The maturity on the product is still not at one hundred percent, so there is room for improvement for Microsoft Azure Container Service to make it better.

I have been working with the product for three to four months now.

In terms of working with the product, regarding stability and usability, I would rate it a seven on a scale of one to ten.

Scalability is a nine, which indicates my view on the ability to scale and the ability to expand.

I give an eight for Microsoft technical support, which reflects my feedback about tech support.

It could be better, which is why I gave an eight. Many times, we see that their response time to address the solution should be better, as it takes longer for them to solve the issue.

Positive

We saw that App Service was proving costlier, and that is the product we replaced with Microsoft Azure Container Service.

We are going for an option by which we can better scale with lesser cost, which is our reason for transitioning from App Service.

Initially, it was complex, but slowly we picked it up because we were also in a learning phase. Microsoft helped us, so the setup process for Microsoft Azure Container Service is a little better now.

We are moving out of App Service, and we are going for containerization, so we are using Azure Kubernetes Services, which is the solution we have started to work with.

Azure Kubernetes Services is the solution we will move everything into from App Service, converting into containers and then deploying it back.

We are trying to explore AI services from Microsoft Azure such as automation, but we have not started on that. We are trying to explore it, but we have not started on Azure AI Search or Azure AI Vision with artificial intelligence technology from Microsoft Azure.

Other than Microsoft Azure, we are moving towards multi-cloud. This reflects my experience as I use some other vendors. Slowly, we are going to increase the adoption of other partners, and we don't want to get stuck with one cloud provider. The problem at one cloud provider is that it's impacting overall business, which we have seen in two to three cases already in the last six months.

I have totally moved to Azure Kubernetes Services and for Microsoft Azure Container Service, I am also using Container Services.

Integration with Microsoft Azure is work in progress as we are establishing automation so that it can be automatically deployed.

We are also exploring this in Azure Kubernetes Services, and currently, we are using Azure Insights, but we would need certain more products for observability.

My final rating for Microsoft Azure Container Service is an eight.

You will have a Docker container and push the container to the container registry. 

The product makes things easier since it's self-managed. Therefore, there is less administration workload and operational costs. 

Since the product is fully managed, it is expensive. 

I have been working with the product for three to four years. 

The product is stable and I would rate its stability a nine point five out of ten. 

The product is scalable and has auto-scale features. 

The product's support depends on the type of support package that you have purchased from Microsoft. If you have purchased a premium package, then you will get access to VIP support, else you will need to wait. 

Positive

The tool's setup is straightforward. You can use the Azure pipeline to orchestrate the deployment. 

The solution's pricing is reasonable. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. There are two types of containers, Windows and Linux containers. This solution is best for those with Windows containers since it is less complicated, easy to maintain, and has lower overheads. 

We use the solution for migration from on-premises to the cloud or from container services to the cloud. 

It offers security as well within the environment. 

You can use it for containers and storage. You can create containers for storage for multiple use cases. 

Visualization is the most important feature.

The initial setup is very easy.

It is very stable.

The solution can scale.

It could be faster. The speed is not good in our country.

The migration process takes a long time. We don't have fast internet services, and that slows us down. 

Standard support could be more helpful and responsive. 

We'd like to have more stable updates. It updates too often. Instead of updating more often, they should update less often and offer very stable updates. 

I've used the solution for ten years.

The stability is fine. I'd rate it nine out of ten. There are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. It is also updated frequently so it is always improving. 

I'd rate the scalability ten out of ten. It is very scalable. 

It does take support a while to resolve issues. Maybe the premium support would be better. The standard support is not the best. 

Neutral

It is simple to set up the solution. We've never had issues with the installation. I'd rate the ease of setup eight out of ten. 

The deployment only took a couple of days. The issue for us is that we don't have fast internet, and the migration slows down based on the internet speed. 

We had two engineers managing the deployment and five to six people with maintenance tasks. 

The pricing is a big high. I'd rate it five out of ten. It's moderate. We typically get a three-year license that is paid annually. I don't have the exact price. However, it's based on storage usage. 

We are partners with Microsoft.

I'm not sure which version number we are on right now. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. As a hybrid solution, it's very good. The solution updates quite often and are improving all of the time. 

The solution is stable.

It's a great product if you are in a Microsoft environment.

The scalability is good.

In terms of the container strategy, they need to make it more compliant with the Linux OS. The containers are currently, Azure services. In terms of large Fortune 500 companies, they are very much into Microsoft services, and it is quite operatable. 

In SMEs, in small, and medium case businesses, their landscape is scattered. They are not predominantly Microsoft and, depending on different geographies, their OS could be different. They might want to do a bit more functionalities on the Linux OS side as well. They need to be far more compatible, beyond Microsoft.

I've used the solution within the last 12 months. 

The stability is good. I'm working with different clients. So far, there are no major issues. I'm not sure if there's anything that has come out recently, however, overall, it has been the preferred service provider for container services.

It is definitely scalable. If your applications are cloud-native and you are able to plug in the functionality into different microservices, then definitely it makes it easier for scalability. Overall, the functionality of Azure Kubernetes is quite scalable. We need to look into the client's application environment. If there is a lot of legacy code, there are a lot of complexities within the code, and then how are we going to tackle that. 

I haven't reached out directly to the technical support team. It is not exactly the role that I play. It comes down to the technical team, the tech leads, to reach out to the support team. 

Overall support is quite good. It just depends on the seasonality part of the request as well. During the peak seasons, during Christmas or Black Friday and all that, sometimes you receive a delay in response. In general, it is quite good. There are no major hiccups there.

We sometimes learn the nature of the problem is something where we need to have a couple of follow-ups with them to make them completely understand what challenges are that we are facing.

Support is a bit varied. There's no standardization in terms of service. There is quite a bit of variance depending on each. I'd like it if they could become more standardized.

Positive

We have seen an ROI. As part of our business case, we do evaluate the return on investment on any such initiatives. We look at how soon we can achieve the breakeven and in terms of the overall cost savings and the overall operational efficiency, what kind of fast development cycles will cost. We also look at reducing the time to market for each and every initiative. We look into all those factors as well as the development cost of the operational, maintenance, and support costs that determine the overall ROI for this. And we have witnessed positive trends.

I'm in the consulting space. I'm not into coding or implementation. I am a cloud consultant in that sense. I look into the planning, the overall cloud migration, the cloud strategy, cloud operating model for the client.

I'd advise new users to not go big. They need to first identify the short-term goals and start with a POC first. The company needs to have an alignment with its team. Make sure to have a complete understanding of the product. Before going ahead and investing significantly, invest in some areas of the application landscape that you want to test out which are not very critical in order to understand the pros and cons. Once you weigh in the benefits you can then go for a significant investment into Azure, or any environment in that manner.

If your organization is mainly Microsoft, this is a very good product. However, other things to consider are AI (and how much AI you want to use) and regional aspects, as connectivity may not be as good everywhere. There are, for example, some areas where AWS works better.

When we work with clients, we take it on a case-by-case basis and see what makes sense. However, I would advise companies to wait until they have 90% surety before they seriously dive in.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

In our company, we are working on establishing containers for development teams. This idea is very new in my company and we are starting to migrate some of our applications, such as internal software applications that are running in the production environments. Additionally, we are providing Kubernetes and container environments for one of my customers that has a data center. I am involved in designing and developing the container infrastructure for two teams, DevOps teams, and development teams.

You save time and resources by using this cloud service over the on-premise deployment.

When comparing this solution with the on-premise environment Azure AKS, this solution is far superior. It has a lot of good features, such as reduced time and energy for the administration of a control plane and worker nodes because they are provided by and managed by Microsoft. We have to specify the number of nodes we are going to work on, Microsoft offers scalability, available master, and worker nodes. Additionally, you do not spend time on security, patching to fix bugs, and vulnerabilities, everything is managed by Microsoft. The cloud version provides a load balancer all configured by Microsoft, while in the on-premise version you have to implement a load balancer and you have to be involved in configuring the load balancer which is a long process.

Storage is one of the most beneficial features of cloud providers, specifically Azure because when you are working in their cloud environment, you can easily use a storage interface and a storage object that is provided by Microsoft Azure. In a local environment, you have to be involved in establishing and setting up distributed storage file systems for containers which are very difficult and complex. In a cloud environment, you are not concerned about the storage and the dashboard provides you with storage objects with high availability.

If Microsoft Azure can provide GUI dashboards for end-users and administrators to work separately to manage all the Kubernetes clusters without a need to connect to Azure environments and through CLI it would be better.

In an upcoming release, the solution could improve by having better security. Security is a big challenge in the containers and if Microsoft could provide a simpler method to authenticate or authorize and integrate security features to vulnerability channels, for example, online scan images and Docker containers, it would be helpful. It then would be possible to integrate the whole stack of containers with Microsoft Azure technology. You would not need to rely on Linux features and would be able to rely on Microsoft technology, such as Active Directory and encryption protocols.

I have been using this solution for approximately two years.

I have not been involved in contacting  Microsoft engineers and Microsoft support because at this time we do not have any complex problems or trouble that we cannot solve ourselves. However, Microsoft's support is in a cloud environment is a great benefit, they are very supportive and helpful.

I have previously used other solutions.

One of the benefits of Azure is the simple administration, most of the operational activities are configured by Microsoft.

In my on-premise environment, I am involved in installing and configuring the on-premise cluster for approximately three master nodes with ten worker nodes in one week. When comparing with the Azure environment, I did the same in less than one day. It is very simple and if you understand Kubernetes objects you can easily in two or three hours establish a cluster and container environment.

Microsoft Azure Container Service has costs but in the container environment, there are no costs because it is open source and we are using Docker as the container engine in the master and worker nodes established in the Azure environment. 

I have evaluated many other solutions.

Before implementing this solution you have to consider is the internet connectivity to the Azure environment. For some countries that have sanctions, moving data on the cloud environment might not be allowed due to local regulation. In general, Azure Container Service and competitors, such as Google or Amazon, are more than beneficial in comparison with local on-premise environments.

I am working in a few companies as a consultant. I advise them on whether to move to the Azure environment cloud or on-premise and ultimately they choose the option based on my advice. One of the companies migrated on-premise workloads to Azure and uses container services. However, in another company, we do not need to go to the cloud due to some local regulation and therefore we have to establish an on-premise environment.

I rate Microsoft Azure Container Service a nine out of ten.

We are a solution provider and we help our clients to implement services. In this role, I make use of this product. It is generally used for container services to install images, such as Docker files. This includes storing images in a repository.

Using this solution means that you don't have to store and secure your container images within a private network.

The most valuable feature is that you don't have to maintain the infrastructure. It is an out-of-the-box service that is hosted by Azure.

It is a secure way to store container images.

It has integration capability with multiple CICD tools and platforms that are available in the market.

API support is very good. You can use it to create calls to upload images, download images, and manage the repository.

Microsoft has provided a lot of documentation that is available online.

In the future, I would like to see it generalized and have the ability to better integrate with open-source tools.

I have been working with the Azure Container Service for between two and three years.

As this is a PaaS that is provided by Azure, it means that if there were any issues then they would have to be publically addressed by Microsoft. I have not lately heard of any problems from my customers.

It is quite easy to scale. I work with medium and large-scale companies in sectors such as energy and banking.

I have been in touch with the Microsoft technical support team many times. Generally it is good, although it depends on the type of support that you have. They have multiple support plans available, and my interaction with them depends on the support that they subscribe to.

Some of my clients have premium support plans, in which an engineer will be assigned to you. They track each and every issue and it will be a pretty quick turnaround time for the issues that you face.

If you are on a standard support plan then it has its own affiliates that will be followed up by Microsoft. Even in this case, the response time is quite good.

I have worked with similar solutions including the Amazon Cloud Platform, two years ago.

Most big cloud platforms have their own capabilities but the majority of functionality is in common. It comes down to the advantages and disadvantages of each solution. Some points in Azure are better, whereas other points in AWS are better.

Microsoft has come up with a service called Azure DevOps, which is a good platform that none of the other providers have right now. It provides the capability to automate your CICD processes or DevOps processes within the organization.

AWS has pipeline capability but they don't have a platform that is equal to Azure DevOps. Azure will give you pipelines, test plans for testing things, and they provide functionality for managing your work.

The initial setup is straightforward and not complex.

This is a PaaS solution that is hosted on Azure and we can configure it based on our needs. To spin up Container Services in Azure will take between 15 and 20 minutes. Automation of this is also possible either through ARM or Terraform.

Initially, to start with Container Services, any one person can do it by following the documentation that is available online. The documentation will help to determine the best design of the infrastructure, based on the requirements such as security. 

If the customer has a complicated set of requirements then we may have to give them some advice with respect to implementation.

As a cloud platform, there are multiple options available for licensing. The costs depend on the resources that you use, and there is a cost-management system to help calculate it. The number of hours will affect the total cost.

The licensing cost is for the support, so it varies depending on the plan and the agreement. In the case of an enterprise-level plan, the cost is an agreement between Microsoft and the organization.

My advice to anybody who is considering this solution is that it is a good option to use because it is more secure. You can secure your images and your code, which are stored on that cloud. You have dedicated access and you can integrate it with Azure Active directory. 

It is also a PaaS offering, which means that you don't need to manage your repositories. You only need to manage your data within them. Finally, it is cost-effective in terms of storing data.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is for training purposes, and for reading about what our colleagues do globally. So we basically use it for our customer projects.

Microsoft Azure Container Service is a great program and I like its usability and the time it takes to market. It is very fast to deploy as part of the DevOps and it has a good security level. So I think the usability and the pricing based on desktop cost make it a good product.

I believe that the support can be faster. I would also like to see easier implementation and better documentation. But it's also a Pandora's box. I believe that one can always do better. 

I also believe that security and integration can be better, so it would be nice to see an improvement there.

I have been using this solution for just under a year now.

Microsoft Azure Container Service has a good level of stability.

I believe the program is scalable. I am the only end-user of this program, so I don't have experience of how it will work in larger environments. Our clients are enterprise businesses.

I am not sure about the technical support - it depends on the kind of issue I'm having and what the actual problem is. But I believe the SME network is important because they have experience from different customer cases. 

I wasn't very impressed with the documentation, so if I had been able to follow the guidelines and employ an implementation, it would have been easier to set up and install the program. So I would say it was semi-easy, semi-difficult, in the middle.

The pricing is good.

Of course, I can recommend this program to others, but they must first do an overall study and analyze the program to verify that it is business-driven, not technology-driven. In the next version, I would like to see better security because it is rather limited in this version. Updating the security would be great, as well as more integration of capabilities.

On a scale from one to 10, I will rate this program an eight. This is simply because I only use it in a lab environment - I don't have any other experience of the program.