Microsoft Azure Reviews

We have most of our servers running as VM's in Azure. While still a hybrid environment, we are gradually moving all our servers and applications to Azure.

Azure Active Directory and Azure Active Directory Domain Services make it possible to have Azure VM's join a domain without the need for additional domain controllers. Users can join their CYOD to Azure Active Directory using their Azure credentials. With MDM in place, we also have the means to manage all devices, CYOD or BYOD.

The Disaster Recovery service - Azure Site Recovery (ASR) has enabled us to have our production servers and applications replicated to Azure and ready to take over in case of a major failure or when a site goes down. In addition, ASR helps us save money on expensive hardware.

It has helped us to scale, no matter what Azure feature you use. Scalability is of the utmost importance.

Regarding improvements:

• MDM: Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Intune features are slowly moving over to Azure. I think as an integrated feature, there will be better ways to manage mobile devices.
• Azure backup: It is still hard to configure and to figure out which Azure backup component to use for backing up different data on various storages.

We have been using the solution for four years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

The technical support is skilled.

Everything you do for the first time can be complex. Setting up a VM in Azure is straightforward, but setting up a Disaster Recovery plan or moving a complete infrastructure to Azure can be complex.

Most of the complexity has to do with initial lack of experience. Diving into the material, study and hard work together with colleagues helps a lot.

An experienced System Administrator with years of on-premise experience will be able to make the move to Azure.

As a consultant, I leave this area to my sales colleagues. When in doubt, contact Microsoft. They will be able to clarify your questions.

We are a Microsoft Gold Partner, so we only use MS products.

Features such as Azure object storage, IaaS, Azure System Center, Azure SQL Database are valuable to me.

It provides:

• Scalable workload with elastic cloud capabilities

• Hybrid IT management of the on-premise and cloud workloads

• Disaster recovery

Azure is growing its open-source offerings and I see this as a continuous area of improvement.

I have used this solution for six years.

Early on, there were issues with the workload interruptions. Over the past 12 months, it has been a stable cloud service.

There were no issues with its scalability.

Technical support is one of Azure’s strengths, I would rate it above average to excellent.

I previously used Savvis and Verizon’s IaaS Enterprise Cloud solutions.

The initial setup was moderately complex. The use of PowerShell greatly increases the ability to fine-tune workloads, i.e., after the initial setup was completed.

If you have the existing on-premise licenses, make sure to ask for their special licensing promotions so as to allow consolidation of licenses and subscriptions, in order to maximize the current investment and control TCO.

We looked at other solutions such as AWS, Google's Cloud Platform and Terremark/Verizon.

Leverage their cloud credit program so as to allow your team to become acquainted with Azure, before turning on their cloud billing services.

The availability of the humongous amount of features and solutions in Azure are most valuable to us.

The continuous improvement of Microsoft is amazing. The agility and speed at which Microsoft is doing all this is really amazing.

The improvements are more on the partner's part than on the product's part. It is difficult to keep up with the continuous improvements that Microsoft is doing.

Issues were seen in the size and unclear configuration settings. If the bandwidth is limited, it can be an issue when migrating from on-prem to off-prem.

We have implemented this for our customers since the very beginning.

This depends on the support contract which you subscribe to. The free support is bad, but the paid versions have better support, i.e., more you pay, the better the support.

The other solutions that we had used before were on-premise solutions. We saw a major shift of the resources towards Microsoft Azure.

The setup was straightforward; with the help of TechNet, if there were any issues then they were easily solvable.

In regards to the pricing and licensing, you need to be aware of what to do. If it fits in your current licensing contract, add it to that contract. If not, then depending on the company's size, ask the reseller with whom you are doing business (or ask me) for advice on this issue.

We did evaluate other solutions and, in some cases, we also advised for this product, as it is specific to certain workloads. AWS and Google are the other vendors that we looked at.

Have a vendor agnostic partner to look at your environment and discuss the vision you have on this.

This product helps companies to build their own infrastructure in the cloud without the need of any physical server. This is nice for new, small companies. For big companies, there are services like containers, docker, and infrastructure as a service for making their environment less heavy and saving some costs, using hybrid infrastructure and service concept.

The most valuable feature is the possibility of using Microsoft and non-Microsoft services on one environment. For example, Windows servers, Linux servers, backup solutions from Veeam, etc.

There is no one special feature for me, as it makes sense as a complete package. I would mention container services as well, as this is the most modern concept of bimodal IT. For example, doing development in companies without the need of building development servers. You can just using some special parts as micro-services and putting them together like Lego pieces. This is the real benefit of cloud and Azure.

There should definitely be some improvement in the UI. It is lacking in terms of where the end user has to click on other icons and go back to the main menu to change some small settings and then go back through many options to the main request. This is something which Microsoft is constantly working on, but still it needs improvement.

Monitoring options should be more sophisticated, as there are dashboards on which a end user is able to pin a lot of charts and a number of web parts, but for example, I would love to have some option like in Operational Management Suite. For instance, some queries and filters Maybe those are already there, but I have not been able to find them. I have to combine the Operational Management suite for Infrastructure, PowerBI for subscription and Application Insight for applications.

Alternatively, I can create a PowerBI dashboard for everything, but this is not for everybody, as it is not always so easy.

Managing of separate subscriptions if you have more than one and in separate domains, it is not so easy to manage. I can’t merge all of my subscriptions, as I am able to have only one enterprise subscription in one account.

There have been no stability issues. I have some problems related to subscription management, but this is because I have more than one subscription and there were some problems related to merging those into one management.

There were no issues related to scalability at all.

Technical support is provided by ticketing system in the portal, so you can create a ticket and a few hours after that, the support guys will contact you, and will try to call you during business hours and will help you immediately. I had really specific problems a few times that needed longer discussion with support, but standard tasks were quickly resolved.

Nice and smooth since the beginning.

Related to pricing and licensing, you have to be careful how you operate with the concept. You would like to set some automation rules for automated shutdown and start up your virtual machines so that they are not consumed costs, etc. So it is about the logic of using this solution.

We evaluated Google and Amazon.

Prepare everything before implementation. Make your plan and calculate what should be the best solution or alternative for you.

This solution is at the top of what you can get at the moment on the market. There are huge amounts of separate tools and scenarios from infrastructure monitoring and administering, to hybrid scenarios or quick service creation and maintenance. The main benefit is the possibility of creating quick services, which you can select from many Microsoft and third-party service providers as well.

• Quick and easy deployment
• Complete packaged solutions to deploy (Web Apps service)
• Clear pricing
• Low cost
• Easy scaling
• Cost effectiveness (stopping a VM when not in use)
• High availability
• Easy restore and recovery
• Integration with Active Directory and Office 365. There are many benefits. For example, there is a special customized portal for all apps and services built in Azure AD (myapps.microsoft.com) with a seamless single sign-on experience for the users in AD or Office 365.

It improved our project completion time. A new server or solution requirements are now solved in hours instead of in weeks.

What we experienced after two years with an Azure suscription is that there is good knowledge in Microsoft Partners for Azure, but generally they are too specialized and couldn't cover everything, because they allways miss something related by example to networking, database, web apps, security, or integration on Azure. So you must contract more than one Microsoft Partner to have a successful project in Azure.

I have been using Azure for two years.

We had no stability issues.

It is very easy and quick to scale up or scale out. It has automatic scaling by CPU performance or other rules.

Support is very good, fast, responsive, and effective.

We used traditional on-premises virtual machines and switched to Azure for better cost and faster deployment.

The only complexity was the initial setup of a site-to-site VPN to connect our LAN to Azure. The required Azure site-to-site VPN gateway is not fully supported on older firewalls, so you must be careful. For details please read: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-...

Azure’s price is very competitive with traditional hosting (in-house or outsourced). Windows and database licenses are included in the solution price or you can bring your own license (BYOL). There are also several free or open source solutions in Azure.

We looked at AWS. In our case, Microsoft had very competitive pricing due to our Office 365 agreement.

Test it for free with the advice of an experienced Microsoft partner.

• Virtual machines, both Windows and Linux based
• Blob storage
• Azure file storage
• SQL server

This product has facilitated development, testing, rapid deployment, spot resource needs, with a remote off-site that compliments on-premises for the hybrid cloud.

The user interface is great if you like tablet, a.k.a., Windows type functionally. The PowerShell is robust. However, there is not much in between, although you can do a lot of customizing views, dashboards, and other things.

I like the extensiveness of the new VS classic interface. At times, I still find the AWS dashboards simpler and more streamlined. Nevertheless, Azure is more elegant.

I have used the product for several years.

I had no stability issues.

There were no issues, as long as your credit card can also scale.

I don't know about technical support, as I have not had to deal with them. But the various communities, forums, and resources are outstanding.

We have deployed, and continue to use:

• AWS EC2
• EBS
• S3 Glacier
• Route 53
• Lightsail
• Google
• Bluehost DPS
• An onsite mix of Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware

We are doing hybrid to address different needs.

Having used AWS, VMware, as well as Windows, there was a little bit of a learning curve, just as there was for others.

However, navigating the UI, shells, and figuring out what was where, without spending weeks in seminars, training, and watching videos, was actually pretty intuitive.

If you are not used to working with AWS or others, or if you have some tools, Azure is actually pretty extensible and getting easier to working from Windows and vice versa.

Do your homework, understand the type and sizes of resources, see if there are any extra fees, and find out what tools are needed.

Check what level of performance, availability, capacity and economic (PACE) budget, as well as the services that are needed.

Watch your costs and look for value versus the lowest cost.

We looked at AWS, Rackspace, Google, Microsoft, Bluehost, and VMware.

Don't be scared, be prepared; do your homework.

Look beyond lower cost and instead focus on value, enablement, ease of use, compatibility, resiliency, ability to scale with the stability of performance, capacity, and availability.

Look at the extensiveness of services versus a simple check box.

You also need to identify any concerns about the cloud, categorize them, and then discuss with others how to address them, or seek a workaround.

If you cannot find somebody to chat with, drop me a note.

The Canvas flow interface brings a very nice functionality that improves self-learning.

Selecting and applying a machine learning algorithm is not a click-and-run process. In this case, clustering our data has helped us to find patterns and trends that were not visible using conventional (internal) classification.

Stronger R integration in a circular fashion (Azure->R->Azure). Nowadays, it has an unidirectional bias.

I've used Machine Learning Studio for the last six months.

We've had no issues with the deployment.

By using a free account for cloud services can bring you "queued" status, but normally it runs smoothly. The quota defined for free account is enough for a variety of experiments and none of the features are blocked.

We've had no issues with the scalability.

As a cloud service, online chat and email service are available, but the community forums are the best place to solve issues.

We have a support maintenance agreement for Windows/Office.

There are a few competitors in place, and their number is increasing, but friendliness is the strong point of AzureML, comparing to Amazon AWS or BigML.

It does not involve any setup, just having an Outlook or Microsoft account.

Using a free account leads to offline projects. For online projects those issues must be evaluated according to client side company's environment.

Machine learning is just one part of the whole data science cycle. Big data (streaming, video, etc.) or deep learning needs must be addressed with additional tools. But for prediction/classification this is a fantastic tool.

Below is a PCA graph generated by K-means training model and its Qlik Sense panel. The idea is to segment unlabeled data based on numerical features in order to find common patterns that can be grouped, named clusters.

Easy and fast provisioning of Cloud Services including Web sites, Virtual Machines and Databases.

Great for application development testing, staging and production slots.

Better Support and community than the others.

The onboarding services are great for new customers.

No more hardware purchases, software and vendor support contracts = Lower times to production.

Great storage capabilities.

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