What is Microsoft Azure?

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 offers open across multiple frameworks,languages, and tools. It is fully scalable, localized in that it is hosted globally in many datacenters, and has widespread capabilities are, catering for all 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.

Also known as

Windows Azure

Sample customers

BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, HarperCollins, Aviva, TalkTalk Business, Avanade, and Telenor.

Microsoft Azure Reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars

(8)

Aaron Krytus

Network Manager / Senior Network Engineer at Warnock, Tanner & Associates

Aug 05 2016

We've been able to create VMs for development as we ran out of resources locally, but the new portal doesn't feel intuitive.

Valuable Features: Customized Dashboard, Site-to-site and point-to-Site VPN, Virtual Machines, SQL machines, SharePoint, Storage, Test/Dev environments. • Improvements to My Organization: Creating VMs for development has been huge since we ran out of resources locally. Creating Hybrid... more »

3 comments

Avinash MendseYou have taken right decision, today's world is for scale if you want to grow... more »

Farooq AliMicrosoft is improving his Azure services but still faild to announce... more »

Robert Lisiecki

Software Developer at a tech services company with 1-100 employees

There are limits to resources you can use in Azure, but it enables us to offload demand from our data center when additional hosting capacity is required without notice.

Valuable Features: Resource manager API Cloud storage Virtual machine hosting • Improvements to My Organization: Our company plans to use Azure for training and for internal use. We use ADFS and the cloud storage mostly. We are also moving to host labs in Azure to offload demand... more »

Paas report from it central station 2015 07 04e5

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Jim U Wilson

President and Founder at a tech vendor with 1-100 employees

Our Chinese clients can initiate international cloud launches of new IOT products, but pricing for outgoing data caps the ability for startups to justify its deployment.

Valuable Features: Provisioning, info bus, video streaming, IOT templates, Web Services, SQL • Improvements to My Organization: Azure has allowed our burgeoning PRC SOE clients to initiate international cloud launches of new IOT products. • Room for Improvement: ... more »

Scott Helme

Information Security Consultant at a tech services company with 1-100 employees

The low cost is attractive, but stored procedures don't exist.

When I first had the idea to build https://report-uri.io, the biggest thing that jumped out at me was that there could be potentially huge amounts of inbound data that would need to be logged, stored and queried in an efficient manner. Doing some quick research it's obvious that most... more »

2 comments

Emeka AwaguNice article, looking forward to the next blog Cheers! more »

Anton StaykovWriting such an article today shall not miss the Azure DocumentDB, especially... more »

Kleyn Guerreiro

IT Analyst at a government with 100-1000 employees

The Canvas flow interface brings a very nice functionality that improves self-learning.

Valuable Features: The Canvas flow interface brings a very nice functionality that improves self-learning. • Improvements to My Organization: Selecting and applying a machine learning algorithm is not a click-and-run process. In this case, clustering our data has helped us to find patterns... more »

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Alejandro Urcuyo

Technical Solutions Specialist at a tech services company with 1000+ employees

We have lower production times because we don't make any more hardware purchases or have software and vendor support contracts.

Valuable Features: Easy and fast provisioning of Cloud Services including Web sites, Virtual Machines and Databases. Great for application development testing, staging and production slots. Better Support and community than the others. The onboarding services are great for new... more »

Jim U Wilson

President and Founder at a tech vendor with 1-100 employees

It has long-term value when you consider cost-benefit analyses (with Microsoft's pricing calculator), but it's difficult to know exactly what the costs would be for services running on Azure.

Originally posted at http://jimwilsonblog.com/?p=250 A recent article of an interview with the Red Hat CEO touts the benefits of private cloud implementation. See it here. This debate is usually short sited and doesn’t include all CAPEX & OPEX cost associated with the “Free OS”... more »

1 comment

Rens Groenewegen"Free OS". Please check Jim's pricelist. RHEL, RedHat's openstack etc: It is... more »

SrEngineer672

Consultant at a tech services company with 1-100 employees

Learning curve to get it up and running but it's scalable and flexible.

Valuable Features: Scalability, affordability and the flexibility of the product. • Improvements to My Organization: You can off-site required services to help mitigate risk You can take advantage of the scalability to have short term high intensive processes be used by... more »

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168,997 professionals have used our research on 5,118 solutions.

Articles

Ariel Lindenfeld

Sr. Director of Community

IT Central Station

Windows Azure Pricing

Windows Azure 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... more »

User Assessments By Topic About Microsoft Azure

Valuable Features

Customized Dashboard, Site-to-site and point-to-Site VPN, Virtual Machines, SQL machines, SharePoint, Storage, Test/Dev environments.

6 opinions »

Improvements to My Organization

Creating VMs for development has been huge since we ran out of resources locally. Creating Hybrid solutions provides us with greater confidence in higher availability. Storage has made remote access to files much more painless and easy. Using SSO has also been great reducing the number of passwords and locations required to use them.

6 opinions »

Room for Improvement

Since the upgrade to the new UI have now transitioned and enjoy the new interface.

6 opinions »

Scalability Issues

Scalability is Microsofts big advantage. At anytime you can add or take away from your servers growing them or shrinking them to your needs. You can even automate this process. I personally do not get into Enterprise solutions, but it would appear that the G series is quite scalable.

5 opinions »

Technical Support

I rate technical support 8/10. You don't always get the best English speaking technician, however they know their stuff! If they do not they will find someone who does. In the many years I have worked with Microsoft, they have always been able to fix my problem. I only give them an 8 because I have struggled a time or two with understanding their English. This all really depends on the department you need.

5 opinions »

Previous Solutions

In the past, we used our own solution. We have datacenters where we host our in house solutions. We didn’t completely switch to Azure, but did offload some things to free up hardware for other purposes. We also want to offload hosting to Azure in times of high demand.

4 opinions »

ROI

Microsoft does have special pricing for Development purposes. This does help reduce the monthly costs for our team. I do know the pricing versus other cloud solutions is much higher.

4 opinions »

Cost and Licensing Advice

We are MS partners. Depending on your partnership you may or may not get Visual Studio Enterprises licenses. Each license allows you to get a $150 Azure credit per month. This has been great for our developers and I to put in to practice some Azure solutions. At this time however, I have not implemented Azure for any customers to discuss the ROI for them.

5 opinions »

Microsoft Azure Questions

Avigail Sugarman

Community Manager

IT Central Station

May 21 2016

Gartner's 2014 Magic Quadrant for IaaS maintains Amazon Web Service at the top of the Leaders quadrant. Do you agree?

Amazon shares the space only with Microsoft Azure cloud, which, though far below AWS, is now a Leader. What are your experiences with Amazon vs. Microsoft in IaaS? Pros and Cons? more »

10 answers

Abhijit ChakrabortyIf we mark closely the Gartner MQ over the last few years, you will notice... more »

Arturo DiazI agree. Amazon has been for a long time the best option for IAAS. But... more »

Paul MorseI have been involved in cloud computing for many years. The question is... more »

Avigail Sugarman

Community Manager

IT Central Station

Rackspace, Dimension Data, and others that were in last year's Challenger quadrant became Niche Players: Agree/ Disagree

Gartner's Magic Quadrant 2014 for cloud computing places Amazon and Microsoft as leaders. Rackspace, Dimension Data, and others that were in last year's Challenger quadrant became this year's Niche Players - agree or disagree? more »

4 answers

Karl SchulmeistersI completely agree. Cloud Computing vending is a scale business. And unless... more »

Tushar Topale ☁ vExpertDISAGREE. VMware is the present and the Future. Be it VMware vCloud and... more »

reviewer73665Part of the reason for the change is that Gartner split the Magic Quadrants... more »

Karl Schulmeisters

CTO at a healthcare company with 1-100 employees

Has anyone done oAuth with Azure Active Directory?

I'm curious about anyone's experience implementing oAuth on Azure Active Directory. Its supposedly supported, but we are having difficulties getting it to work stably and my developer has been getting mixed signals from MSFT help desk. more »

Avigail Sugarman

Community Manager

IT Central Station

PaaS solutions: Areas for improvement?

If you were in the room with the product manager from Amazon and Microsoft and could give them advice on how to improve their PaaS solutions, what areas for improvement would you suggest? more »

5 answers

Mike BasilI primarily work with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. My... more »

Md. Shams SultanIn adopting Cloud Foundry, the “big aha” included the forecasted 50%... more »

Koustubh SinkarI do not use Microsoft products, so I shall only give suggestions for Amazon.... more »

Microsoft Azure Projects By Members

Check out these projects from our community members.

We changed paper based survey process of Penny

We changed paper based survey process of Penny Market retail company, manage the service from cloud, front-end is... more»

Managed the infrastructure to support National Elections for

Managed the infrastructure to support Portuguese National Elections for the TV Channel - TVI24

Cloud Development Platforms Project

Select cloud development platforms

Managed development of world's first complete and comprehensive

Managed development of world's first complete and comprehensive ISO 9001 software meeting 100% requirements of the... more»

Integrate cloud computing solutions to our data center

Integrate cloud computing solutions to our data center.

Last-minute platform to boost sales and data collection

Launched a last-minute platform to deliver marketing boost and data collection in 20 days. Created a platform for... more»

Cloud based backup and infrastructure monitoring

Mobile app & data delivery to 1300 contractors

I managed our firm's engagement to deliver a new mobile application and data via Azure to 1300 contractors with... more»

Microsoft New Zealand Cloud SMB Partner of the Year

Microsoft New Zealand Cloud SMB Partner of the Year 2015

ITaS / IaaS: Working Hard to Have These Services in our Assets

ITaS / IaaS is our goal, with SDDC with VMware, hyper converged (SimpliVity) and QNAP with storage. PyME´s are our... more»

Designed and Established the technological considerations for implementing

Designed and Established the technological considerations for implementing a solution that was based on cloud... more»

Microsoft Azure Consultants

Request a call with one of our top consultants and experts in Microsoft Azure. (Add me to this list.)

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Points

SrEngineer672

Consultant

Reviewed Sophos UTM: Sophos's web filtering & SMTP filtering is much...

Points

Mark Arteaga

CEO

Mark Arteaga specializes in helping customers implement enterprise and consumer facing software solutions. Mark has an extensive background in software development and has dedicating the last 10 plus years to the trade delivering solutions to customers such as Microsoft, Bell Media (formerly... more>>

Reviewed Microsoft Azure: Top Reasons Developers Should Use Windows Azure...

Points

Uriel Maimon

Owner

If it wasnt my job it would have been my hobby - lucky me ;-) CONSULTING/PROJECT MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCE: 15+ years work experience Professional Services / Consulting Project Management R&D Management/Supervision Coaching/Mentor Uriel Maimon is a Director at bsmArt Consulting with... more>>

Reviewed Microsoft Azure: Implementation is simple but anything to do with...

Points

Richard Astbury

Consultant

Richard has a background in delivering public facing web applications in a variety of market sectors, including banking and healthcare. He is passionate about making software development productive, efficient and fun. He strives to automate processes and utilise frameworks to shortcut... more>>

Reviewed Microsoft Azure: Java and Azure

Points

Nick Mulenos

Consultant

I am a technically minded and relationship driven individual who loves God, people, and technology. I'm excited to utilize my education and training to contribute to the technical world.

Reviewed Microsoft Azure: 5 Great Features in Windows Azure Backup

Points

Nathan Lasnoski

Director of Infrastructure

I am an Infrastructure Architect and the Director of the Infrastructure and Platform Practice at Concurrency, a national technology solutions company in headquartered in Brookfield, Wisconsin. I work with customers in the design and development of Infrastructure technology solutions through my... more>>

Reviewed Microsoft Azure: When to use different Azure IaaS storage types…