We are currently on AWS.
We signed a contract to move to Azure.

I have had nothing but troubles and issues. How can you sell an unfinished product????

Your documentation is NOT there,
Your product is buggy as **** (cant even configure a set of servers to test my application)
SUPPORT SUCKS AS ****. I opened a ticket and it goes unanswered for months!!!!

Do yourself a favor and work with Amazon AWS. LEARN from them. their support is beautiful.

Our company has now decided to reverse our contract with Microsoft and stay with Amazon AWS.

If for simply initial configuration there is no documentation, and no one to support me and I have to beg on internet so that someone have pity on me and tell me he is going to help because he knows some other guy inside Microsoft (and yes it has happened),, THEN simply think what **** would I go through if I put my production on this useless platform.

Ridiculous.

P.S. I am talking about ARM,

I used the new portal to create a new Resource Group & Web Hosting Plan - but when I try to create any new service in them, it fails with an error:

OPERATIONNAME Update deployment
STATUS Failed
EVENTTIMESTAMP Fri May 09 2014 14:16:31 GMT+1000 (EST)
CALLER <email removed>
AUTHORIZATION
action:Microsoft.Resources/subscriptions/resourcegroups/deployments/write
role:Subscription Admin
scope:/subscriptions/d1a7a1b2-2ae7-4fd7-8d90-ec8b203bbd3b/resourcegroups/ww3fesea/deployments/Microsoft.WebSite
RESOURCEURI /subscriptions/d1a7a1b2-2ae7-4fd7-8d90-ec8b203bbd3b/resourcegroups/ww3fesea/deployments/Microsoft.WebSite
SUBSCRIPTIONID d1a7a1b2-2ae7-4fd7-8d90-ec8b203bbd3b
EVENTSUBMISSIONTIMESTAMP Fri May 09 2014 14:16:40 GMT+1000 (EST)
OPERATIONID 15b47143-47e7-4f4c-a732-e9815b450ad4
CORRELATIONID f4ca9023-a78f-4140-b5e3-e2b096d3ee0f
LEVEL Error
RESOURCEGROUP ww3fesea
RESOURCEPROVIDER Microsoft Resources
EVENTSOURCE Microsoft.Resources

I contacted MS support and chose billing because that's all that is available and get told that I need to purchase a support plan.

So just to clarify, to sign up for a new paid service using the new portal which gives an error, I need to first purchase a support plan?

I understand MS cannot provide free support to everyone wanting to know why their website won't work. But not allowing people to create tickets for issues with the MS websites is ridiculous.

Am I wrong?

I sometimes see alert message which inform me Platform incident may have impact our services on Azure. I can see it from Management Portal or Preview Portal right now. Platform incident information is very important for us who keep running services on Azure. Please inform these information by email since I can’t realize incident information if I don’t login to the Portal.

Alert Message Example:
”Starting at approximately 00:45 on 26 Nov 2015 UTC some customers using Storage in West US may encounter errors or timeouts when attempting to access resources. Engineers have identified a configuration issue and deployed a mitigation. Customers may now be able to access Storage services, and we are continuing to validate service health. The next update will be provided within 60 minutes or as events warrant."

- Japanese
Azure 上で利用しているサービスがプラットフォームで発生している障害の影響を受ける可能性があることを通知するメッセージを目にすることがあります。現状では、管理ポータルまたはプレビューポータルで通知メッセージを知ることができます。プラットフォームで発生している障害の情報は、Azure 上でサービスを提供している私たちにとって、とても重要な情報です。ポータルにログインしなければこの重要な通知に気付くことができないので、障害の情報をメールで通知してください。

アラートメッセージの例：
”Starting at approximately 00:45 on 26 Nov 2015 UTC some customers using Storage in West US may encounter errors or timeouts when attempting to access resources. Engineers have identified a configuration issue and deployed a mitigation. Customers may now be able to access Storage services, and we are continuing to validate service health. The next update will be provided within 60 minutes or as events warrant."

All the support that I needed in the past years, was caused by Microsoft services and servers that simply failed to do its' duty.

You cannot chat with Microsoft so to get my last issue solved, I had to purchase a 6 (SIX) month support plan...even if the problem wasn't caused by myself!

I would love to have the opportunity to buy a one-time-support plan to get Microsoft to look into the problems that my servers have at that very moment! And...if the problem was caused by Microsoft..the payment should be refunded. Otherwise Microsoft potentially could create its' own income by programming bugs into their environment.

Microsoft could really take an example of the way companies like SendGrid work. Online support (for free), online chats (for free) and online training (for free) all to help the customer to get what he wants and expects.

Provide more detailed information about ongoing outages - tell us what exactly is wrong, what is working, and when we should expect services to be restored. Generic error messages like "We are investigating issues impacting a limited subset of Virtual Machines customers in North Europe and West Europe. " aren't very helpful. Another problem I see is posting updates every 2 hours and telling us that next update will be available in two hours. If we know, that issue will last several hours we can perform steps to restore service in other region, but it's useless to perform these steps if the outages will last only 30 minutes.

Also provide us some post-incident analysis - what went wrong and what steps were performed to avoid similar incidents in future. Nice example is Visual Studio Online team, that usually provide explanation of outages on their blog. It is hard to convince our management, that Azure is the right choice for us, if we can't explain reason for outages.

I used to be on IMB Softlayer, and it was working great and I didn't have any issues with it. I got into one issue when I lost the password for my server. I contacted support, there where no wait times, it was free, and they reset my password for the server. I decided to give Windows Azure a try. I ran into hundreds of problems when setting up my server. It is also very expansive (while IBM SoftLayer is VERY cheap and they offer free tech support). After I started receiving all those problems and couldn't get tech support, I just went back to IBM SoftLayer.

Well, I am user of MS Azure for few years. From its basics. Old portal was great. Everything worked great!

You created new portal and put it into production with **** message "Swhitch to new portal, which is better...blah blah blah...".

This better and new portal is piece of **** Dear Microsoft! Whatever I am trying to do, I fail.

I spoke in conference for devs, that Azure provides greatest services for them. When I have my demo, 10% of things works. Other failed. I felt like an idiot.

Today I created (non-classic) VM. Entered username, password - all done. VM is created and i want to login. FAILED... FAILED...FAILD... So, I maybe wrote bad password (which i didn't -I pasted it). I want to change password. Your BETTER new ******' stupid portal told me.. Comming soon! Are you really ******' kidding me? Really?

I have only few words for you... get your ***** together! You have greatest cloud infrastructure in the world which is awesome. But tell me... Why the **** are you publishing things that are not completed?! WHY?!

I know, that this is off-topic but i have your THE BEST LUMIA (950 XL) too. Same ****! OS which is not complete is installed and is absolutely useless!

If you want to have success or new customers, take care about your services and software that you are publishing. AND FORCE USERS TO USE IT! INCOMPLETE SOFTWARE!

Thank you for your attention.

The opening a support request flow could use some improvements in my opinion:
1) You should be able to attach screenshots, diagnostics traces, etc... directly in the request. Right now I have to wait for the email from the support person and send them there
2) There should be a way to close or indicate that the issue is resolved by the customer. Instead all status updates have to be made by Microsoft Support team which is a waste of their time if the end customer already knows that the issue is resolved
3) You should be able to choose the business impact while creating the ticket. Right now there is no option so you have to go back and change it after the fact
4) On step 7 there should be a "Create" button instead of an OK button and then having to go back to the previous flyout and hit "Create". Very confusing UI