Microsoft Azure vs Rackspace Cloud [EOL] comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Microsoft Azure and Rackspace Cloud [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle and others in PaaS Clouds.
To learn more, read our detailed PaaS Clouds Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: Rackspace, Dimension Data, and others that were in last year's Challenger quadrant became Niche Players: Agree/ Disagree
Answer: Agree. All those are not true cloud player but somewhere in between hosted cloud and true cloud computing.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The solution is very simple to use. It has a lot of great practical applications we really appreciate.""Azure virtual machines are stand-out.""Provisioning a server is fast, taking only one or two minutes before it is ready.""The focus on security is excellent. We really appreciate that about the solution.""Feature-wise, I like its stability. Also, it is easy to access the solution and its options.""The solution is very simple to set up.""I like the familiarity of this solution.""Azure's Data Lake services are decent. I like AKS, and API Management is relatively straightforward to use. The security and SIEM options Azure offers are good. All the infrastructure services are easy to use and set up."

More Microsoft Azure Pros →

"Image backup is a valuable feature. Even though this is a common feature, it is very helpful for us.""There is easy integration with multiple providers and third-party services.""The most valuable feature for us is the support, which is really efficient."

More Rackspace Cloud [EOL] Pros →

Cons
"There are many bugs in the solutions and we already have a ticket to Microsoft. Their content team is working on that.""Azure does not handle scalability as well as its competitors. Sometimes a 10 percent increase in a server with 20 percent of CPU usage pushes the server up to 100 percent load, and you start having performance issues.""Microsoft Azure can be pretty advanced and difficult to understand. I would like it to be simplified. The licensing especially needs to be simplified.""I would like to see better policy-based management and everything related to security management could have been better integrated.""Their backup strategy is a little complex which racks up the VM to other sole storage areas. This should be improved.""There are a number of services offered by AWS that are not yet available on Azure.""We need more security to be available on our smartphones and mobile devices.""From a security perspective, there is always something that can be improved as we serve our customers."

More Microsoft Azure Cons →

"It doesn't offer Elastic IP like AWS. And also we can't configure our server based on region.""It would be nice to have more built-in suites compared to others. It would enable easier integration."

More Rackspace Cloud [EOL] Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Related to pricing and licensing, you have to be careful how you operate with the concept."
  • "Be careful with Azure Cool storage accounts; if you are dealing with high object counts, then it can be more economical to use Hot storage because of the high storage access costs associated with Cool."
  • "Make use of Azure pricing calculator and you will find out that Azure Is still more reasonable that the competition and do your research, when unclear speak with your MS support."
  • "It’s necessary to use third party products or to use good self-management economic tools"
  • "Keep to PaaS to gain the optimal benefits from an OPEX finance and resource perspective."
  • "Several thousand dollars and counting, we haven't needed to upgrade on premises hardware (In fact we eliminated all of the old on-premises hardware and run 100% on Azure) or pay for it's maintenance, power etc."
  • "If you are not aware of costs, pricing, etc., you can end up with a hefty bill. However, I found that the Azure price calculator is a valuable tool to use before starting to deploy VMs in Azure. This tool will give you an overview of the costs you should expect on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis."
  • "Pricing is very difficult to guesstimate. With so many a la carte options and individual pricing it can be a hassle to understand."
  • More Microsoft Azure Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The service includes licenses (for operating systems, databases, etc.). Asset management is easier with services like that."
  • "Comparatively, this solution is a bit expensive."
  • More Rackspace Cloud [EOL] Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for alluring IT customers. This article give brief history of these cloud hosting service providers and compares the cloud services provided by them. -- Amazon Web Services -- It's hard to find someone who doesn't agree that Amazon Web Services is the market leader in IaaS cloud computing. The company has one of the widest breadths of cloud services - including compute, storage, networking, databases, load balancers, applications and application development platforms all delivered as a cloud service. Amazon has dropped its prices 21 times since it debuted its cloud six years ago and fairly consistently fills whatever gaps it has in the size of virtual machine instances on its platform - the company recently rolled out new high-memory instances, for example. There are some cautions for Amazon though. Namely, its cloud has experienced three major outages in two years. One analyst, Jillian Mirandi of Technology Business Researcher, has suggested that continued outages could eventually start hindering businesses' willingness to invest in Amazon infrastructure. That sentiment gets to a larger point about AWS though - the service seems to be popular in the startup community, providing the IT… Read more →
    Answers from the Community
    Avigail Sugarman
    it_user73665 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user73665 (Works)
    Vendor

    Part of the reason for the change is that Gartner split the Magic Quadrants into two Magic Quadrants this year. One for native IaaS cloud infrastructure and one for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting. Rackspace lead the market in the latter which is closer to where they have been trying to position themselves.

    it_user8685 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user8685 (Infrastructure Expert at Cloud Counselage Inc. (www.cloudcounselage.com))
    Consultant

    DISAGREE.
    VMware is the present and the Future. Be it VMware vCloud and vSphere suites, tough competition for Amazon etc. or be it vCHS. Also, VMware's very own Public IaaS Cloud; vCHS (VMware vCloud Hybrid Service) which will change everything in days to come vis-a-vis Rackspace, IBM's Softlayer etc. Microsoft is not in a competition at all, because it lacks quality compared to the names mentioned above. __Tushar Topale

    it_user105252 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user105252 (CTO at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees)
    Vendor

    I completely agree. Cloud Computing vending is a scale business. And unless you have the $$ Billions to invest in DCs, interconnects, CDN capacity, as well as in continually investing in the OS and Management software infrastructure, you cannot be anything but a vendor that caters to a particular narrow segment.

    Its a bit like telephony. You aren't going to do very well going up against GE/Sprint, ATT or Southwest Telecom. BUT if you are an EarthLink, you can play in then niche space of those who want a "socially responsible" Telco.

    About a year ago, both Rackspace and Centurylink were looking for "capital partners" for future growth investment precisely because of these issues. I don't think they ever raised enough $$.

    I have been saying for about 5 years now that there is room for 4-5 major cloud vendors and they were going to be:
    Amazon, Google, Microsoft. and then fighting for the last 1-2 slots were
    IBM, salesFORCE.com, EMC and perhaps Oracle. Oracle seems to have opted not to keep fighting, and EMC is now more focused on delivering services.

    So you basically have IBM leveraging its corporate DC and mainframe hardware consolidation capabilities and Salesforce is leverging its lead in CRM to get apps built on Force.com

    But pretty much everyone else is a niche player. The Future is Platform As A Service. NOT "vms" and Rackspace and Dimension Data all were hoping to move from VMs to PaaS but that's a hard move to make.

    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:IBM Public Cloud is IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service. It aims to provide organizations with a secure cloud environment to manage data and applications. One of the features we like is the cloud activity… more »
    Top Answer:One of the best features of SAP Cloud Platform is that it is web-based and you can log in from anywhere in the world. SAP Cloud Platform is suitable for companies of any size; it works well with both… more »
    Top Answer:I would recommend Google Firebase instead of Microsoft Azure, simply for the array of features that it has to offer. In particular, the Firebase library grants you access to a shared data structure… more »
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    Ranking
    1st
    out of 33 in PaaS Clouds
    Views
    37,026
    Comparisons
    29,748
    Reviews
    27
    Average Words per Review
    547
    Rating
    8.3
    Unranked
    In PaaS Clouds
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Windows Azure, Azure, MS Azure
    Learn More
    Overview

    Windows Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform, where developers can create, deploy, and maintain their apps. This cloud application platform allows developers to concentrate on the actual applications, while it takes care of all the elements behind the apps.

    Windows Azure works across multiple frameworks and languages. It is fully scalable, localized in that it is hosted globally in many datacenters, and has widespread capabilities with elements of application development, deployment, and management.

    Azure is comprised of several different service modules, including Infrastructure; Web; Mobile; Dev & Test; Big Data; Media;Storage, Backup & Recovery; and Identity & Access Management.

    Microsoft Azure works as a:

    1. Platform as a service (PaaS)
    2. Software as a service (SaaS)
    3. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

    Microsoft Azure is available:

    • On-premises
    • Hybrid
    • Multi-cloud
    • At the edge

    Compared to its competitors, Microsoft Azure:

    • Has more affordable features
    • Has easier migration for organizations already using other Microsoft tools
    • Has several educational resources available
    • Provides robust support
    • Is ideal for small and large businesses

    Microsoft Azure Features:

    • Scalability
    • Stability
    • Flexibility
    • Azure Site Recovery
    • Active Directory
    • Monitoring features
    • Cloud-based
    • Automated tasks
    • Change capability cadence
    • Showback capabilities
    • Information protection
    • Azure Data Lake
    • Excellent portal
    • Intuitive user interface
    • Remote desktop
    • Fast provisioning
    • Data security
    • Data resiliency
    • Speed of service
    • Integrated delivery pipeline
    • Disaster recovery
    • Robust templates
    • Flexible coding languages
    • Virtual systems testing

    Benefits of Microsoft Azure:

    • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Because Microsoft Azure is an IaaS, organizations can deploy as well as manage applications easily and quickly. Azure also provides you with the ability to customize the cloud software to meet your specific business needs.
    • Seamless integration: Microsoft Azure is built to seamlessly integrate with existing IT departments via hybrid databases, secure private connections, and storage solutions.
    • Cost-effective: Because Azure can harmoniously exist in your business environment with your data center, it is a very cost-effective solution.
    • Analytics support: Azure is designed with built-in support that is used to analyze data and provide key insights. Azure offers Cortana Analytics, Stream Analytics, Machine Learning, and SQL services.
    • Unique storage system: Compared to other cloud services, Microsoft Azure has more data centers and delivery points, which helps create an optimal user experience and also helps deliver content faster. In addition, Microsoft Azure makes it possible for organizations to exchange content across several virtual machines.
    • Enhanced flexibility: Azure provides extreme flexibility by allowing you to choose any level of functionality you require. It also supports many of the same technologies IT teams and developers usually depend on, making it easier for them to manage.
    • Easy implementation: Microsoft Azure is easy and quick to deploy. If necessary, you can change web apps to Azure with almost zero downtime.

    Reviews from Real Users:

    "It is a flexible solution that is straightforward to use," says the principal consultant at a computer software company.

    OmarJ., future datacenter consultant: Microsoft Azure Cloud at a tech company, adds that "The user interface is very nice and makes everything easy to use."

    You can build an environment in minutes. It's very good in terms of being an infrastructure as a service, and I found that really fascinating,” says an information technology consultant at a computer software company.

    "I think Azure's level of automation to achieve efficiency or agility is valuable. I also like the change capability cadence, the showback capabilities, and understanding what our costs are," says an enterprise architect at an energy/utilities company.

    Marco C., Ing. at Wolters Kluwer, says "The valuable features of Microsoft Azure are that it is cloud-based and has good storage. The storage is completely managed by Azure. We do not need to do any patching of security because it is handled by Azure which is a benefit. The solution is fully compatible with the Microsoft technology stack and is very scalable."

    "The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure is it has everything together in one place. It is one large tool with lots of small tools that are updated often," says the owner of a media company.



    Rackspace is a listed company that specializes in hybrid cloud environments to support your applications and sites. The environments are based on its open-source operating system OpenStack.Rackspace Cloud caters for the private cloud, public cloud, dedicated servers, or a hybrid of platforms.

    Your Rackspace Cloud environment is customizable according to your cloud requirements, and all products work together seamlessly from one portal.

    Sample Customers
    BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, HarperCollins, Aviva, TalkTalk Business, Avanade, and Telenor.
    3D Capacity, Acquity Group, Axios Systems, Behance, Blastro, Dominos Pizza, and Sage.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company22%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Comms Service Provider9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization35%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    No Data Available
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business41%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise44%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise40%
    Large Enterprise46%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business73%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise18%
    Buyer's Guide
    PaaS Clouds
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle and others in PaaS Clouds. Updated: March 2024.
    765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Microsoft Azure is ranked 1st in PaaS Clouds with 298 reviews while Rackspace Cloud [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in PaaS Clouds. Microsoft Azure is rated 8.4, while Rackspace Cloud [EOL] is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Microsoft Azure writes "Promotes clear, logical structures preventing impractical configurations and offers seamless integration ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Rackspace Cloud [EOL] writes "There is easy integration with multiple providers and third-party services". Microsoft Azure is most compared with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, Pivotal Cloud Foundry and SAP Cloud Platform, whereas Rackspace Cloud [EOL] is most compared with .

    See our list of best PaaS Clouds vendors.

    We monitor all PaaS Clouds reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.