Azure Virtual Machines Reviews & Insights

In our business we often have a need for VMs. Sometimes the VM needs to be reliable and always available. Sometimes it needs to be disposable. Sometimes we need to quickly upgrade the VM to respond to the increasing demand for the app running on that VM. All that is a a breeze to handle on Azure Virtual Machines.

If you’re looking for a dead cheap VM, Azure Virtual Machines is not for you. However, if you’re looking for a very powerful VM to use short-term, or you need a VM that’s flexible and can be upgraded or downgraded within minutes (and even programmatically) then Azure Virtual Machines is very well suited for that.

Azure Virtual Machines is our first choice when we want to host virtualized Windows servers in the cloud. No other hosting provider provides the excellent level of integration that Microsoft does in their Azure hosting environment. Whether we need to spin up a server for a short period of time, or keep a production critical instance running with minimal failure, we only use Azure Virtual Machines when that server requires Microsoft Windows.

If you want to host a dedicated Windows server on the cloud, and especially if you want to integrate it with your on premises Active Directory, Azure Virtual Machines should be your first choice. Obviously running Linux on Azure works very well too, but given Azure's pricing is not the cheapest, there are other providers out there that have a better cost-benefit ratio for Linux. That said, hosting Windows on Azure can be affordable (especially when compared to other providers) if you plan your licensing, topology, and application architecture correctly.

Azure VMs provide us with the flexibility, scalability, and reliability required for cloud management and optimization solutions. We can leverage VMs for various use cases, including application hosting, development and testing, data analysis, disaster recovery, and hybrid cloud deployments. Also one of the major use of of Azure VM is it's highly cost effective than AWS EC2 so it helps us in Cost Management part as well.

Azure VMs will be best suited in terms of flexibility, scalability, and reliability.
Also for cloud management and optimization solutions one can trust the Azure VM. We can leverage VMs for various use cases, including application hosting, development and testing, data analysis, disaster recovery, and hybrid cloud deployments.
One more thing with Azure Is that they provide a great customer support as well

We use Azure VMs for 2 main reasons. The first one, is when we need to do a lift&shift from on-prem to the cloud, where the main purpose is to migrate a system as-is to the cloud before restructuring it. The second reason, is for specific needs where we can't solely rely on PaaS or SaaS services, and we need to have the flexibility provided by a lower level IaaS VM

We tend to use as much App Services, and Serverless as we can. But what those win in ease of use and efficiency, they lack in flexibility. Many workloads cannot run on those services. Especially when you need heavy and time-consuming computing. Azure Virtual Machines on the other hand, give you anything you need in terms of flexibility, since you have access to the underlying OS, and for the fraction of the price. But as always, it's a tradoff, since you also need to manage, reboot, maintain, and patch those VMs

I used Azure Virtual Machines in my last organization for deploying out Machine Learning model and related workloads on virtual machines. Our requirement was to enable automated deployment of our compute engine - Databricks, our ML models, and Airflow workflows on scalable virtual machines and Azure Virtual Machines was our choice in the last organization I worked with.

The VM deployment process is really simple in Azure Virtual Machines. But as I said earlier, compute types were a bit limited when I used it. In a few scenarios we had requirements for a Bare Metal GPU instance for high performance compute, but it wasn't available, so we had to look for alternatives.

We have a small cloud footprint and we use it more to test specific applications and how they behave off-premise.

My experience has been positive so far. There is so much documentation online that I have yet to run into any real issues that were not self-produced. You should understand what workloads are suitable to run in the cloud before migrating your entire datacenter. Expect latency and possibly downtime that is out of your control.

We used Azure VMs to deploy docker containers. They are really easy to get started with and work well with for us as part of a multi-cloud strategy. There are various options available in terms of size and cost to meet the organisation's budget requirements. Microsoft also has some of the best support I've seen with solutions architects sessions through MS for startups.

We've never used on-premise servers and have a cloud-native business. VMs are fairly straightforward products with a wide range of use cases. Lots of availability zones to increase redundancy and lots of configuration options ie VPCs etc.

Azure Virtual Machines are easy to configure and install and offer highly scalable and flexible possibilities with ready-to-use on-demand resource availability which enables our organization to optimize server and storage utilization capabilities. Easy on report creation and also easy to adjust functions to fit the way we work.

Easy to extend our on-premises workloads to Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines and provides us with on-demand capabilities to storage and a highly flexible and scalable product. A secure product that protects our workloads and has very good controls to access and is cost-effective with the pay-as-you-go billing system and offers ready-to-use storage resources.

In our company, all of the VM infrastructure used for production and corporate needs is in the Azure cloud and we Use Azure Virtual Machines for all of our needs. The only exception, when we don't use this product in the Azure cloud, is when we use Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets. Azure Virtual Machines come with different hardware configurations and it can suit any need - there are small VMs for testing and DEV and there are very large VMs as well built for higher performance of the production environment.

For those who use the Azure cloud, Azure Virtual Machine is the best option for Compute resources, it provides flexible pricing plans, worldwide availability and almost any scale that you will need without wasting too much time for these resources to become available. In Azure Cloud, serverless Compute is also available, so for specific usecases, this can be used instead of Azure Virtual Machines.

We use VMs for many different purposes:
- Isolated development machines for working with Azure cloud services.
- Hosting Jenkins master server used to deploy our Azure-based applications.
- Hosting Jenkins agents for CI/CD pipelines which are built on separate VNETs for dev, test, sim, and prod.
- Azure Data Factory integration runtime to run ADF pipelines.

Using a self-hosted integration runtime with Azure Data Factory, although only supports Windows, will make it more expensive. Hosting DevOps tools, such as Jenkins, code scanners, etc. can be set up very easily and replicated if needed. Any kind of distributed architecture, like Selenium grid for GUI testing of applications, can be set up very easily because of the myriad of possibilities for OSs.