Microsoft Azure

Avantages

I have found the best use for Azure is to off site the IT hardware for infrastructure, So now IT can not only have the team off site but now that off site team doesn't have to worry about the servers being touched by employees messing around in the network closets.Allowing entire companies to be managed off site.

Inconvénients

Price on VMs, non transparent price, ease to setup redundancy...

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

Microsoft Azure is truly the way of Cloud computing as it helps save money through IaaS/PaaS offering Infrastructure and Platform As A Service. No need to have on-premise computing power when you can have it in the Cloud allowing you to efficiently use the resources.

Inconvénients

Azure requires comprehensive training, IT expertise to set up. And for the end-user when you don't have internet you will have no access to the resources.

Avantages

A good way to track your Agile process, easy to set up PBI's. Easy to attach docs to the PBI and prioritize each of the items.
I like the way it tracks all of the changes made in the PBI, easy to see who made changes to the PBI.

Inconvénients

Is not a user friendly tool for folks new to the Agile process, if an item is not complete in the current sprint it's confusing to track in the next sprint as it creates duplicate PBI's. I think if you are seasoned at using Agile this would be a good tool.

Avantages

I gave 5 stars to its features and functionality because Azure really tries hard to stay competitive in the market and it has most of the features that a cloud provider should offer. We use Azure to provide our services to our customers that work with Microsoft.

What I like the most about Azure is its AI tools. Azure is really successful when it comes to machine learning.

Inconvénients

I will be a little bit cruel about Customer Support and Ease of Use.

We work with Azure as CSP partners. One day we had a problem with one of our servers and I couldn't even reach to support team to get help. Later I learned that since we are CSP partners we cannot directly get in touch with Azure team. Instead we should contact our local dealer to get support. It is tiring to involve bureaucracy to IT when all I wanted was to mount a disk to another server.

Be very careful when you test the servers. You will be charged for a full hour even if you keep the server alive for 5 minutes.

If you do not want to delete a resource accidentally you must lock it. I learned this lock feature from our local distributor but Azure should force you to take such cautions by putting the option directly to the interface. Maybe a little checkbox saying "Do you want to lock your resource?" would be nice.

The interface should be more user friendly. It is really complicated for the beginners. The partial windows that open in each step is confusing. It will be easier without the split structure.