Azure Cloud Services

What do you like best?

Azure was the first cloud I've tried. I like Azure because they have a lot of select locations that other cloud providers don't have. I really like the central south US location because that's where most of my clients are at, and it's strategically placed in the center of North America, which gives them low latency across America.

What do you dislike?

Azure can sometimes painstakingly slow when stopping instances. I've experienced this problem over 3 times already when instances are stopping. My virtual machine instance was stuck on "Deallocating" for a few hours, and I could not access it. Of course, I could after waiting 3 hours. Azure is also costly, so I rather not leave my instance on 24/7 to save money.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Azure has helped us in setting up temporary servers for our customers to run their programs in locations that other cloud providers do not serve. The servers are closer to the customers, so they all get lower latency, which improves response time for our applications. The benefits I realized is that our customers experienced lower latency on Azure, which means happier customers.

Also, I find that Azure network has the best routing out of any other network. From South Central US to West US only takes 25ms, which is astonishing. It helped us reach our customers faster, which is essential for the real time work they're processing on the servers.