Spinning up virtual environments and hosting software for clients and we use cold and hot storage for clients servers and backs with azure as they offer some of the best storage rates as compared to AWS. We can also spin up virtual domain and active directories for our clients to remove the heat and maintenance from small facilities on the edge of their environment that might not have a dedicated space for IT. Allowing us to now only offsite the IT but also the infrastructure.

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.

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

I have 3 Azure certifications at the moment and will continue the Developer path. I like that Azure is an extension of our datacenter but allows us to do a lot more since they are constantly abstracting services in order to gain ease of management. An example of this can be seen with containers since you can deploy them to AKS and manage the nodes but if it's a simple deployment you can deploy to Azure Web Apps or Azure Container Instance. If you want a full AKS deployment but do not want to manage node updates then Azure ContainerApps is a good solution. I really like that they offer Azure Open AI so companies can leverage a chat-gpt like environment that's private while allowing companies to add their data inside their tenant and not out to a public / popular service.

Signing up to previews can be difficult and often needs to involve sales reps before doing so to make sure we can have access to products.

Azure is developing itself continuously and I believe it will be better in the future.

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.

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.

Microsoft Azure provides the perfect environment to design, develop, test, deploy, and monitor advanced analytics workloads on the cloud. We use Azure for data warehousing, Pipelines, and machine learning to extract and process data from various sources. The SQL-managed services handle infrastructure and resource allocation to simplify the provisioning process and help us focus our team effort on workflow optimization, solution improvements, and project goals. Azure Cloud is a Collaborative and inclusive development environment with an easy-to-navigate user interface and has efficient billing and cost management tools that help us better our teamwork.

Microsoft Azure provides reliable cloud storage, computing, networking, infrastructure, resources, and tools for solution development and deployment. The analytical services and SQL solutions are fast and integrate seamlessly with on-premises SQL Server systems. The platform is secure, easy to implement, and continuously adds new features and advanced AI capabilities. The customer support is friendly and responsive. Also, Azure has an extensive learning platform and solution architecture center to help developers design and optimize better cloud solutions.

Azure continuously adding new features is critical for success, but it is a bit overwhelming and requires continuous learning to keep up with the latest updates.