Microsoft Azure Reviews and Pricing

Director of IT at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Jun 30, 2012

Windows Azure is classified as platform, as a service, and forms part of Microsoft's cloud computing strategy, along with its software as a service offering Microsoft Online Services

What is most valuable?

-Windows Azure is available in multiple data centers around the world, enabling you to deploy your applications close to your customers. - Its enables you to use any language, framework, or tool to build applications. Features and services are exposed using open REST protocols. -Windows Azure’s distributed caching and CDN services, allow you to reduce latency and deliver great application performance anywhere in the world. -Giving power back to the users to concentrate on the application and take away all their worries from the hosting and provisioning point of view.

What needs improvement?

-Systems mirroring is currently not available within Azure, unlike Amazon Web Services. -Lose account control to MS. -MS has calibrations to compute how much you used them, and how you plan to validate it.

What other advice do I have?

The Windows Azure platform, which provides a range of functionality to build applications that span from consumer web to enterprise scenarios, includes a cloud service operating system and a set of developer services. With Windows Azure there are at least two instances of each role that the application needs and therefore, the Fabric controller load balances users’ requests between them. What this means is that there is no guarantee two requests from the same user will go to the same instance. This may be a problem with some applications that need a stateful connection with the user. A stateful connection is one in which some information about a connection between two systems is retained for future use.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user4401Developer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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Oct 19, 2013

I agree with your pros, and as other pro I would add that the only need is to deploy the application, because all the rest is Microsoft managed, the user has no worry about the windows patching and updates, server running out of space, technical troubleshooting and maintenance cost, and time saved in building up the servers.
As a con, I would say that only windows centric applications are supported by Microsoft for technical assistance, so if there is an error it could be difficult to determine where is from.