Microsoft Azure

Avantages

I n an informative age where there is rapid growth in technological advancement, the successes achieved in different sectors like the business sector must include a high level of subscription into technological products. In relating the first generation technological gadgets which were massive in size to the present age modernized appliances and technological tools with are as small as the microchip, one cannot but understand the boundless nature of advancement and the need to flow with the tide. Cloud computing, one of the very few technological advancement of recent times allows for the storage and accessing of data and different resources over the internet.

Inconvénients

This minimizes the need for individuals to own and move about with computer hard drives as they can securely access their information, edit and retrieve this information at any given point in time. This seems to be a more flexible and efficient option when compared to the conventional personal computer (PC). The development of Azure, a public cloud computing platform made cloud computing more useful to individuals, small and medium size businesses and even the multinationals. This posed many benefits to growing businesses that could not afford to purchase the necessities for their business operations like softwares, storage devices and servers, the small businesses only needed a web browser in their computer and an active internet connection.

Avantages

1966/5000
There are some impressive backup solutions out there, I'm talking about products born in virtualization ... and not those designed for tape backup 20 years ago that some of you buy because that's what they've always bought. Some of the excellent products are even advertised on this site. They have their own unique approaches and points of sale, which I should applaud, and I encourage you to visit their sites and try their free trial versions. Then you have options, and that's a very good thing.

We use a lot of DPM and store our long term in Azure, as described by Aiden. I want to share some important obstacles that we have come across so you can benefit from our experiences.
1) We had a DPM protection group with 76 protected Hyper-V virtual machines. This protection group was programmed to send recovery points to Azure all at once. 76 was too much and the OBEngine.exe service (Microsoft Azure Recovery Services Agent) was blocked every night, so I had to restart the OBEngine service and manually restart these online backups every day. By splitting the protection group into several smaller protection groups (each protecting about 20 Hyper-V servers instead of 76) and scheduling them to send recovery points to Azure at different times of the night, the problem was solved. I do not think this is a bandwidth problem (since we have a lot) but that the OBEngine service was being overwhelmed. The errors I found in DPM every morning clearly indicated that the OBEngine

Inconvénients

It lacks options for life cycle management.
- Some of the functions only work in the classic portal.

The reliability of the services depends on the technological and financial capacity of the providers of services in the cloud. The information of the company must go through different nodes to reach its destination, each of them (and its channels) are a source of insecurity. The centralization of the applications and the storage of the data originates an interdependence of the service providers.

It is useful if you are not familiar with Azure to take an online training course that will definitely take you a long way to master it and increase your confidence in the product. It tends to use resources and when the VM goes down it is slow and freezes.

the dashboard design is confusing AF, it is difficult to find things. You pay the support, or send them a tweet and cross your fingers. Billing is confusing, especially at the beginning, and it is impossible to estimate costs without seeing the use of an entire application / site.

infrastructure as a service allows me to free up time and resources until then to maintain its own infrastructure, security measures are beyond the reach of most companies, security regulations give customers the confidence that their data will be totally protected.

The support was incomplete (my experience of 1 in 18 months was very disappointing). In summary, regardless of what the system tells you, if you do not buy a help plan, it is SOL

Avantages

There are a ton of amazing points about Azure. The ease of which you can spool up new websites, databases, or even entire virtual machines is incredible. You can do in minutes what would take you hours to do on site. Setting up communication between resources is also quite easy.

Inside each installed item (website, VM, SQL Server, etc.), there will be options that you can configure. These options make it very easy to quickly configure your resources in a way that is best. Not sure what you should do for setup? No problem. There are usually only a few pages of options, so it is easy enough to click through each page and read them (and their associated help). That allows for a much better experience for even novice Azure users.

Inconvénients

I like Azure a lot, but there are definitely some big areas for improvement. The biggest, I think, is a very clear and transparent pricing system. It is very difficult to figure out what a certain addition will do to impact your monthly pricing. You have to guess a bit at what you think will happen and where you think you are at overall to figure out if you can afford to add another resource. That's not the way it should be.

The interface leave a lot to be desired as well. They just updated it, but it actually added to the confusion. There are so many boxes and flyouts to navigate, it gets hard to figure out what resources you are already using. I would like to see a very clear "this is what you have" system, especially when new resources can use the existing resources. For example, you can set up a VM to host your websites. Cool. However, that VM is a special one and it is hard to find to configure. Also, it is hard to figure out if it would be ok to add another website to it or not (is it pegged out or is there some wiggle room to add more load?).

Like I said, I like Azure. There is just room to make it better.

Avantages

Azure has certainly changed the way I look at platform hosting, as well as app availability. Before Azure, it was a real pain to plan deployments of both new and updates to the web. From the setting up of IIS, to the configuring of firewalls and everything in between, it was always on of my most dreaded tasks. With Azure, everything is central and easily managed. I can spin up new apps, update existing apps, scale up or down on resources, and the list just goes on. I think back to the days of having to coordinate with so many people for hardware, software, networks and even a simple server reboot was something that was always a big concern.
So many cool features, from basic to "I don't know yet, but I am excited to find out", Azure has made life so easy for myself and our company.

Inconvénients

When a data center goes down, it is a mission to get your databases going. The app side is okay, but SQL on Azure becomes a huge challenge. There are tools to make life easier for DR scenarios, but they are pricey and through research so far, I found that even having a combination of the available options in place, still will not guarantee a hassle-free way of keeping your databases available.

Avantages

I have been using Microsoft Azure for the past 5+ years. I was never a big Microsoft fan, having dropped Windows for Linux/Mac for more than 15 years already. At first I was sceptical as to how can a company with its own technologies thrive in a space dominated by Unix based systems.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that in terms of services offered by Azure you miss very few as compared to Amazon cloud and gain much compared to Google's cloud offering.
Command line tools support is on par with what an experienced developer would expect, the line of offering for different services is amazing and ever expanding and the customer support is there when you need it.
All in all I would recommend Azure services to any developer that is looking to start developing in the cloud or even needs to develop in multiple clouds for high availability purposes.

Inconvénients

The one thing that Microsoft can improve on Azure is transparency in pricing. There are times when I'm trying to evaluate cost between different clouds and it's more complex to figure out how much our usage would cost on Azure as opposed to AWS.