Microsoft Azure Reviews: 4.3/5 — Solid Choice

I like the PAAS functionality. It has a lot of features I use.

The UI is not the best and they are limited on the types of VMs you can have.

Cloud housing

Needed some help to set up, but not too bad to use

There was a lot of setup, which I needed some help with

We use it to communicate across OS’s

I really like it that Microsoft not only supports but also embraces other open-source applications on their Azure platform. They really encouraged the open source community database engines to go to Azure and fully be supported in the cloud.

Their touted migration of either MySQL or PostgreSQL to the Azure Database for MySQL or PostgreSQL has been delayed.

Being able to set up web apps that include PostgreSQL and being able to automate the deplomwnt of my web app + database with ARM templates.

The idea itself is perfect. Database as a service without managing it`s infrastructure. I beleive in future releases it will grow to something more suitable for complex workloads. Great resource management, elasticity and scaling options. Much better than Amazon RDS. Very secure solution. Perfectly works for simple web applications processing sensitive data

Functionality is still not enough for complex applications, we failed to go-live with it and had to deploy on-premise version of SQL Server on Azure virtual machine

Data platform for web aplications

Easy ability to learn. Azure Helps Your Application Become More Responsive as User Load Increases.

Slow processing. High Throughput, Low-Latency Data Access To Power Scalable Azure Applications.

Azure Cache for Redis can also be used as an in-memory data structure store, distributed non-relational database, and message broker.

Without Question it's probably one of the most flexible platforms available today.

I can begin with cost... As a developer who mostly develops on the Microsoft stack it's not easy for me to be critical as I love Visual Studio and SQL Server... but one thing that Microsoft has kept in play is complicated licensing pricing. It is so complicated that you can ask two different Microsoft Certified licensing professionals the same question and receive two different answers. Unfortunately Azure has picked up this HORRIBLE practice and made figuring out how much you actually are going to need to pay anyone's guess. Several times I've had to tell clients flat out that they would have to get the service for a couple months to get an idea of how much it costs... Who want's to do that? Horrible! I am always for advancement... but another thing I highly dislike about Azure is the platform changes way too much way too fast! I've spent a lot of time and effort learning the platform only to have to relearn features again weeks later! I feel bad for the professionals who take the time to do online videos on the Azure platform because each and every video I've ever seen that covers a feature of Azure is quickly outdated... I've literally watched videos or followed online tutorials that are only a couple months old and couldn't follow along because the platform changed how it was done!

I've had several clients host virtual domains and virtual machines in production work... but because of the cost and the complexity of the ever changing platform I have since migrated all of my customers to 1 and 1.

Azure allows infrastructure and virtual machine management from anywhere. Since the product is integrated into Microsoft 365, there is no need to manage separate logins. After a year of using the product very heavily, there have been no outages.

There is a number of features that I would expect in a hosted solution that Azure simply doesn't offer. Some of these are very basic expectations, for instance, there is no ability to open the console of a virtual machine in Azure, you can only connect via RDP. You can view screenshots of the console, but this is my no means equal to viewing the actual console. This makes system upgrades, especially on non Microsoft OSes, more complex than necessary. Additionally, you cannot boot from an ISO in Azure. This severely limits your ability to install and configure non-Microsoft systems. We have also experienced unexplained performance issues on database systems. We have purchased the highest level of virtual hardware, but the systems are still much slower than they should be. Pricing can also be confusing and result in some unexpected charges.

We have eliminated the need to implement and maintain server hardware onsite. Azure also makes it easy to allow access to servers from anywhere in the world for users working remotely.

I like the IDEA of this software--test something out in virtual machine form first, before committing to a change permanently.

I hate the execution of this software--instead of providing any significant value add, it just ends up being yet another buggy software to install.

It is nice to be able to test new OS before installing it. We have a lot of company specific software that might have compatability issues if we installed upgrades immediately.

Quick an easy to launch a SQL instance with robust security offerings

Everything else, pricing - essentially paying for enterprise license at every scale point, regardless of need, BYOL helps, but you pay a lot for very mediocre hardware/performance support - even with premier support it would take on average 2 weeks to resolution for bugs, and even performance issues would generally take 6+ hours before magically disappearing stability - node changes with up to 30s downtime every 4-7 days, breaking changes that you cannot opt out of, essentially you are in a constant Beta limitations - DTU model and vCore are fundamentally broken for > 500Gb databases in terms of backup/restore and migration, regardless of pool/db DTU/vCore size differences - Just enough differences from standard SQL that you will likely have to make changes to your applications migration limitations - It is fairly easy to migrate-in, but we evaluated about 8 different tools to migrate data back out and it was painful due to larger database sizes api/cli instability - with about 400 databases and 2-10 CRUD operations/week in terms of database pools we constantly had to manually monitor our automation increased DBA needs - there were so many new issues with Azure and tools/scripts that needed to be modified that we had to add a new DBA and rework most of our automation. Even after 18 months, we still were at higher DBA utilization than before Azure DevOps needs - Not purely and Azure SQL issue, but the fact is that I can fairly easily find/hire someone to build a SQL cluster, finding an experienced Azure DevOps engineer is extremely difficult. With Azure SQL being proprietary there isn't much tooling that works with it well either Documentation - As-is the case with most of Azure, the documentation is scattered, generally outdated, and often wrong. We often went through Premier support, but even then we would often get an answer that was either old or just didn't work.

The original goal was to simplify our database operations, and get better value than our private cloud solution. Ultimately we started the process to move to SQL on IaaS due to all of the Azure SQL issues

The built in security that it offers is nice.

Everything else - this is so bad to use that I just booted up a VM and used that instead. Random restarts leading to your working data being lost, performance being up to 100 TIMES slower than if you just hosted it yourself. Unreliable networking - just becomes unreachable for periods of time. Overpriced.

Shared working memory set between large distributed applications.

Allows company to do backups and integrate with different data sources

There is solutions much more viable. Microsoft is not investing on it

Backup critical company data

To be honest I liked the fact that they reached out to me to see if I needed help but...

When I responded to the e-mail reaching out for help they never responded back

There is nothing I was able to solve as they never got back to me to help me get started

I think the only good thing about the project is that they have open sourced the project. But that probably means that Microsoft is dropping support for it.

Everything, but especially the Emulator that takes 5 minutes to start up each day. The deployments take at least 30 minutes to go out so that is awful as well. I am currently in the process of migrating away from service fabric and getting the UI into a docker container and a node.js app.

We use Service Fabric to deploy a set of microservices. This in turn allows us to keep a continuous uptime with our services.

Well known name brings confidence to user

Extremely complicated, too many layers,

Supposed to be solving a structural need but always get notices from it saying we have a redis cache issue with no other explanation and site outages