Microsoft Azure User Feedback
Strength
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User-Friendly
Everything about Azure is quite straightforward. I can do what ever I intended most of time by simply following my instinct.
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Deploy Speed
I've tried Azure during the early years it first appeared, the speed of deploying a machine was terrible at that time. Now it only cost me few minutes, which is totally fine for me!
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Instant Response
Turning on/off a VM can be preformed immediately without complex procedures.
Shortcomings
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Price ( to students )
I understand that Azure is originally targeted on business service. But for non-commercial usage such as running deep learning for education purpose in my experience, the fee is quite prohibitive. For example, selecting the NC6 (with K80) machine and run it for 1 month will cost the same as buying an actual GPU which runs faster (e.g. GTX 1080) with acceptable memory space. Maybe some education program will attract more users from campus.
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Ping
Machines with GPU are currently available only in several regions, meaning higher ping for regions far away from those in the list. But I think this is only a temporary problem and will be solved sooner or later.
More
Overall, I think the service is pretty useful and user friendly. There are some features that I have no way to determine if they are advantage or disadvantage. For example, the user interface. Azure comes together with the user interface which is fully functioned and provides detail of each service. To me, the GUI is pretty fancy and complete yet sometimes a bit annoying. For instance, the workflow of creating a VM. Every step of initializing a VM is rendered in a new window which extended from the right of current window. The visual effect is great and every detail is preserved, but sometimes it's inconvenient for me to take a look on important settings I've made few steps ago. My suggestion is to provide GUI that comes with different styles, such as a pro version providing more detailed information/options and a simplicity version for those who'd like to keep everything simple.