Azure Cloud Services Reviews & Product Details

Azure was the first cloud I've tried. I like Azure because they have a lot of select locations that other cloud providers don't have. I really like the central south US location because that's where most of my clients are at, and it's strategically placed in the center of North America, which gives them low latency across America. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Azure can sometimes painstakingly slow when stopping instances. I've experienced this problem over 3 times already when instances are stopping. My virtual machine instance was stuck on "Deallocating" for a few hours, and I could not access it. Of course, I could after waiting 3 hours. Azure is also costly, so I rather not leave my instance on 24/7 to save money. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Easily able to migrate Hyper-V servers to Azure VMs. Easy to set up full-time VPN secured certificate-based VPN from the main office to Azure and from VPN service to Azure for remote employees. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Costs could be a little better, but that is the price you pay for such an efficient cloud infrastructure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. Hot Sync and Cold Sync servers to Cloud is very Smooth.

2. File Sync agent give you the accessibility to sync your Fileserver Data to Cloud, to minimize your storage space.

3. WVD will provide you accessibility of your in-house /on-prem application from outside of your organization network.

4. ATA and ATP Security Services will provide you to secure environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. 5TB space for File sync per folder is not enough.

2. Fail-back of DR sync servers are not so smooth, our on-prem servers got hang after fail-back complete, you have to reboot your servers once you complete the failback.

3.Technical support is poor.

4.Customizated WVD image still have pain to implement. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Azure is the dream platform for backup and disaster recovery. It is flexible due to its versatility, sophisticated site regeneration, and other built-in functionality. Azure is innately flexible as a cloud-based solution; you can back up the data in virtually any language, on any OS, and from any place. An amazing feature is that Azure also lets you use multi-factor authentication, bringing to your data and apps a new encryption layer with zero headache for the customers. Single sign-on can also be conveniently introduced for cloud applications for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS. The other beneficiary thing about Azure is that with just a few pages of well-defined options, all the applications are easily configurable. The implementation speed is amazing. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As a cloud-based solution, consumers and computers would not have access to incorporate if you drop your connection to the internet. The pricing model is complicated, which makes it impossible for various solutions to be analyzed and measured. There is a room for change in the pricing model. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that it has a clean and easy to manage platform, it is an advantage over other platforms.

It allows me to deploy services with just a few clicks, it is undoubtedly one of the best platforms and you should use it.

Everything is well organized and has very clear usage prices.

One of the things that I love is that there are already configured templates and you can deploy services very quickly efficiently Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would like to have more support and that I can have much more multimedia material as examples of what I can do on your platform Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It just integrated with all our existing applications effortlessly and the end user did not see a difference and hardly knew about the migration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We.moved to azure quite recently a nd we personally havent seem any big issues or concerns. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The web apps work fairly well and help reduce PCI scope Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Billing error caused production outage and took 2 hours to resolve.

Any production issue takes at least 12 hours to resolve.

28% VM failure rate in 7 months.

Frequent failovers of Azure SQL that require app and deploys to be resilient to 60s outages.

Terrible documentation on anything but the simplest solution.

Incompetent first and second tier support.

Beta rollouts of new features that broke base functionality and took 7 days to resolve because support isn't aware of beta rollout that breaks existing functionality.

CLI, API, ARM, and PS all have different gaps and quirks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The support and implementation team is very supportive and responsible. They are responsible enough to take feedback over email after service. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pricing module is not transparent enough and I believe that should be made more user friendly with all the hidden charges visible. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Availability of so many services, like web apps, VMs, CDN, SQL servers, etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While the variety of services are amazing, there are many of them that seem to be still in beta and not working properly. Like B2C authentication service. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

ease of use and spinning up SQL servers or VM's in general for all my server and SAAS needs Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Pricing could be a little cheaper but it is still a good service Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Its a good service looking forward in using it daily. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Its a little lenghty process could be a little simple. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ease of ingress

I also like the flexibility as well as support. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing. This is a best in class product with equal comparison to aws Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's really a great platform to save your data in a secure manner at a reasonable price. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have not found any feature to dislike. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Microsoft Azure, formerly Windows Azure, is Redmond's cloud computing platform. In addition to its name change, the service has also recently expanded. Essentially, whatever you can do with traditional, on-premise Microsoft software—run SharePoint, manage SQL databases, deploy Active Directory—you can do within Azure. With its new capabilities Azure offers easier creation of hybrid clouds and more robust disaster recovery options for businesses.

Azure is a polished, complex service, yet it's one that's also very easy to get up and running for those who have worked with Windows systems. In fact, it's Azure's general ease of use and excellent wizard-driven setup that cause it to stand out among the competition as our Editors' Choice for small business cloud services. Rackspace in particular trails Microsoft in this regard, relying on the user to search for solutions among text-based FAQs and knowledgebase entries. Furthermore, Azure delivers superb performance, better than either Rackspace or Amazon EC2. Azure may cost more than the competition, but you get your money's worth with the polished interface, peppy performance, and close integration with Microsoft's other services. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Expensive. Hosted server prices do not include any storage.We were impressed with Microsoft’s entrance into the PaaS market; Windows Azure is a great product on an impressive infrastructure. While you may end up needing a workaround to use your preferred language on Azure’s platform, the community around the platform and the Azure support team will have you up and running in no time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Azure's PaaS continues to grow in ways that helps us with scalability, availability, etc. at much lower complexity and cost. We are able to fill in with IaaS pieces as needed without dealing with multiple vendors. Our developers don't like situations requiring us to go back to how we did things before because of the extra time and overhead associated. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As an ISV we would like to see more multi-tenancy inherent in the system. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Provides a way to deliver compute using an OpEx financial treatment.

It's also a market leader for organizations looking for a true platform as a service solution. Azure is gaining speed in the area as the PaaS market matures. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It can be difficult to assess the necessary compute requirements as well as migrate from an existing on-premises environment without expertise and tools.

Because Azure is readily available it's important to get proper governance in place to avoid overspend.

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Easy to spin up an application or VM, good storage options. With an EA agreement billing is far simpler. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Interface still feels overly complicated and clunky. Costs ramp up quickly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Azure portal is very Intuitive , any developers of different skill set or even non-developers can easily spin a website or SQL server setup in matter of minutes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

More Azure Developer community samples would be helpful . Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I use Cloud Services a lot. Recently i started using the Azure Webapp and really like all the troubleshoot and diagnostics tools Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Azure portal sometime acts really weird. there were basic features but it would never work. need good testing Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Azure is good to use with Microsoft services with services using C# Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

for other platforms the API support is not sufficient and requires efforts from the developers end to make the api . Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We use the Azure PaaS platform. We use Cloud Services (stateless web app servers built from a config file that you specify), Azure Storage (including Blob, Table and Queues) and Azure Infrastructure (stateful virtual machines). We use Cloud Services wherever we can and avoid using standard VM's when possible. Cloud Services are very scalable, but you have to develop your web apps to work in the Azure environment to take advantage of the various features. Azure is a great platform to build something new on. It will be harder if you are trying to modify an existing web application to run in the Azure Cloud. The Storage services are very reliable and work extremely well. The Table Storage service is very, very fast. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The caching solutions are not very good. Their first caching product was called "Shared Caching", which was based on Microsoft's AppFabric Cache product. It didn't work very well as a cloud implementation. Then came their "in-role" cache, which works great but cannot be used when you need to share a cache amongst multiple web roles (servers). For example, want to cache your session information? You can't do it with an in-role cache, only a shared cache scenario will do. Also, in-role cache is tied to the specific Azure deployment you have running. If you redeploy your code, such as to fix a big, you end up redeploying our cache too, which has the effect of clearing out information in the cache. If you store session in cache, then your customers have to login again. The beauty of the shared cache is that it is independent of the deployment, so it never loses its data because of a deployment of your web services. The new "Cache Service" is suppose to solve all of these problems, but as of 3/3/2014, it is still in Preview status.

The Cloud Services Load Balancer is very limited. This is the "network load balancer in the cloud" that Microsoft uses to distribute web requests to your web servers. Unfortunately, it only supports round-robin load balancing at this time. I would like to see more options. However, it does automatically stop sending traffic to web servers that are non-responsive or are being rebooted, etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The new web interface for managing virtual machines in Azure and Office365 are really slick and intuitive. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Still a bit buggy. Especially DirSync & VPN. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.