ASP.NET MVC 5, Web API, and Web Pages

Today, we’re announcing the release of the new Azure GS-series of Virtual Machine sizes, which enable Azure Premium Storage to be used with Azure G-series VM sizes. These VM sizes are now available to use in both our US and Europe regions. Earlier ... [More] this year we released the G-series of Azure Virtual Machines – which provide the largest VM size provided by any public cloud provider.  They provide up to 32-cores of CPU, 448 GB of memory and 6.59 TB of local SSD-based storage.  Today’s release of the GS-series of Azure Virtual Machines enables you to now use these large VMs with Azure Premium Storage – and enables you to perform up to 2,000 MB/sec of storage throughput , more than double any other public cloud provider.  Using the G5/GS5 VM size now also offers more than 20 gbps of network bandwidth, also more than double the network throughout provided by any other public cloud provider. These new VM offerings provide an ideal solution to your most demanding cloud based workloads, and are great for relational databases like SQL Server, MySQL, PostGres and other large data warehouse solutions. You can also use the GS-series to significantly scale-up the performance of enterprise applications like Dynamics AX. The G and GS-series of VM sizes are available to use now in our West US, East US-2, and West Europe Azure regions.  You’ll see us continue to expand availability around the world in more regions in the coming months. GS Series Size Details The below table provides more details on the exact capabilities of the new GS-series of VM sizes: Size Cores Memory Max Disk IOPS Max Disk Bandwidth (MB per second) Standard_GS1 2 28 5,000 125 Standard_GS2 4 56 10,000 250 Standard_GS3 8 112 20,000 500 Standard_GS4 16 224 40,000 1,000 Standard_GS5 32 448 80,000 2,000 Creating a GS-Series Virtual Machine Creating a new GS series VM is very easy.  Simply navigate to the Azure Preview Portal, select New(+) and choose your favorite OS or VM image type: Click the Create button, and then click the pricing tier option and select “View All” to see the full list of VM sizes. Make sure your region is West US, East US 2, or West Europe to select the G-series or the GS-Series: When choosing a GS-series VM size, the portal will create a storage account using Premium Azure Storage. You can select an existing Premium Storage account, as well, to use for the OS disk of the VM: Hitting Create will launch and provision the VM. Learn More If you would like more information on the GS-Series VM sizes as well as other Azure VM Sizes then please visit the following page for additional details: Virtual Machine Sizes for Azure. For more information on Premium Storage, please see: Premium Storage overview. Also, refer to Using Linux VMs with Premium Storage for more details on Linux deployments on Premium Storage. Hope this helps, Scott [Less]

Today, we’re announcing the release of the new Azure GS-series of Virtual Machine sizes, which enable Azure Premium Storage to be used with Azure G-series VM sizes. These VM sizes are now available to use in both our US and Europe regions. Earlier ... [More] this year we released the G-series of Azure Virtual Machines – which provide the largest VM size provided by any public cloud provider.  They provide up to 32-cores of CPU, 448 GB of memory and 6.59 TB of local SSD-based storage.  Today’s release of the GS-series of Azure Virtual Machines enables you to now use these large VMs with Azure Premium Storage – and enables you to perform up to 2,000 MB/sec of storage throughput , more than double any other public cloud provider.  Using the G5/GS5 VM size now also offers more than 20 gbps of network bandwidth, also more than double the network throughout provided by any other public cloud provider. These new VM offerings provide an ideal solution to your most demanding cloud based workloads, and are great for relational databases like SQL Server, MySQL, PostGres and other large data warehouse solutions. You can also use the GS-series to significantly scale-up the performance of enterprise applications like Dynamics AX. The G and GS-series of VM sizes are available to use now in our West US, East US-2, and West Europe Azure regions.  You’ll see us continue to expand availability around the world in more regions in the coming months. GS Series Size Details The below table provides more details on the exact capabilities of the new GS-series of VM sizes: Size Cores Memory Max Disk IOPS Max Disk Bandwidth (MB per second) Standard_GS1 2 28 5,000 125 Standard_GS2 4 56 10,000 250 Standard_GS3 8 112 20,000 500 Standard_GS4 16 224 40,000 1,000 Standard_GS5 32 448 80,000 2,000 Creating a GS-Series Virtual Machine Creating a new GS series VM is very easy.  Simply navigate to the Azure Preview Portal, select New(+) and choose your favorite OS or VM image type: Click the Create button, and then click the pricing tier option and select “View All” to see the full list of VM sizes. Make sure your region is West US, East US 2, or West Europe to select the G-series or the GS-Series: When choosing a GS-series VM size, the portal will create a storage account using Premium Azure Storage. You can select an existing Premium Storage account, as well, to use for the OS disk of the VM: Hitting Create will launch and provision the VM. Learn More If you would like more information on the GS-Series VM sizes as well as other Azure VM Sizes then please visit the following page for additional details: Virtual Machine Sizes for Azure. For more information on Premium Storage, please see: Premium Storage overview. Also, refer to Using Linux VMs with Premium Storage for more details on Linux deployments on Premium Storage. Hope this helps, Scott [Less]

Today we are making available several new SQL Database capabilities in Azure that enable you to build even better cloud applications.  In particular: We are introducing two new pricing tiers for our  Elastic Database Pool capability.  Elastic ... [More] Database Pools enable you to run multiple, isolated and independent databases on a private pool of resources dedicated to just you and your apps.  This provides a great way for software-as-a-service (SaaS) developers to better isolate their individual customers in an economical way. We are also introducing new higher-end scale options for SQL Databases that enable you to run even larger databases with significantly more compute + storage + networking resources. Both of these additions are available to start using immediately.  Elastic Database Pools If you are a SaaS developer with tens, hundreds, or even thousands of databases, an elastic database pool dramatically simplifies the process of creating, maintaining, and managing performance across these databases within a budget that you control.  A common SaaS application pattern (especially for B2B SaaS apps) is for the SaaS app to use a different database to store data for each customer.  This has the benefit of isolating the data for each customer separately (and enables each customer’s data to be encrypted separately, backed-up separately, etc).  While this pattern is great from an isolation and security perspective, each database can end up having varying and unpredictable resource consumption (CPU/IO/Memory patterns), and because the peaks and valleys for each customer might be difficult to predict, it is hard to know how much resources to provision.  Developers were previously faced with two options: either over-provision database resources based on peak usage--and overpay. Or under-provision to save cost--at the expense of performance and customer satisfaction during peaks. Microsoft created elastic database pools specifically to help developers solve this problem.  With Elastic Database Pools you can allocate a shared pool of database resources (CPU/IO/Memory), and then create and run multiple isolated databases on top of this pool.  You can set minimum and maximum performance SLA limits of your choosing for each database you add into the pool (ensuring that none of the databases unfairly impacts other databases in your pool).  Our management APIs also make it much easier to script and manage these multiple databases together, as well as optionally execute queries that span across them (useful for a variety operations).  And best of all when you add multiple databases to an Elastic Database Pool, you are able to average out the typical utilization load (because each of your customers tend to have different peaks and valleys) and end up requiring far fewer database resources (and spend less money as a result) than you would if you ran each database separately. The below chart shows a typical example of what we see when SaaS developers take advantage of the Elastic Pool capability.  Each individual database they have has different peaks and valleys in terms of utilization.  As you combine multiple of these databases into an Elastic Pool the peaks and valleys tend to normalize out (since they often happen at different times) to require much less overall resources that you would need if each database was resourced separately: Because Elastic Database Pools are built using our SQL Database service, you also get to take advantage of all of the underlying database as a service capabilities that are built into it: 99.99% SLA, multiple-high availability replica support built-in with no extra charges, no down-time during patching, geo-replication, point-in-time recovery, TDE encryption of data, row-level security, full-text search, and much more.  The end result is a really nice database platform that provides a lot of flexibility, as well as the ability to save money. New Basic and Premium Tiers for Elastic Database Pools Earlier this year at the //Build conference we announced our new Elastic Database Pool support in Azure and entered public preview with the Standard Tier edition of it.  The Standard Tier allows individual databases within the elastic pool to burst up to 100 eDTUs (a DTU represents a combination of Compute + IO + Storage performance) for performance.  Today we are adding additional Basic and Premium Elastic Database Pools to the preview to enable a wider range of performance and cost options. Basic Elastic Database Pools are great for light-usage SaaS scenarios.  Basic Elastic Database Pools allows individual databases performance bursts up to 5 eDTUs. Premium Elastic Database Pools are designed for databases that require the highest performance per database. Premium Elastic Database Pools allows individual database performance bursts up to 1,000 eDTUs. Collectively we think these three Elastic Database Pool pricing tier options provide a tremendous amount of flexibility and optionality for SaaS developers to take advantage of, and are designed to enable a wide variety of different scenarios. Easily Migrate Databases Between Pricing Tiers One of the cool capabilities we support is the ability to easily migrate an individual database between different Elastic Database Pools (including ones with different pricing tiers).  For example, if you were a SaaS developer you could start a customer out with a trial edition of your application – and choose to run the database that backs it within a Basic Elastic Database Pool to run it super cost effectively.  As the customer’s usage grows you could then auto-migrate them to a Standard database pool without customer downtime.  If the customer grows up to require a tremendous amount of resources you could then migrate them to a Premium Database Pool or run their database as a standalone SQL Database with a huge amount of resource capacity. This provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and capability, and enables you to build even better applications. Managing Elastic Database Pools One of the the other nice things about Elastic Database Pools is that the service provides the management capabilities to easily manage large collections of databases without you having to worry about the infrastructure that runs it.    You can create and mange Elastic Database Pools using our Azure Management Portal or via our Command-line tools or REST Management APIs.  With today’s update we are also adding support so that you can use T-SQL to add/remove new databases to/from an elastic pool.  Today’s update also adds T-SQL support for measuring resource utilization of databases within an elastic pool – making it even easier to monitor and track utilization by database. Elastic Database Pool Tier Capabilities During the preview, we have been and will continue to tune a number of parameters that control the density of Elastic Database Pools as we progress through the preview. In particular, the current limits for the number of databases per pool and the number of pool eDTUs is something we plan to steadily increase as we march towards the general availability release.  Our plan is to provide the highest possible density per pool, largest pool sizes, and the best Elastic Database Pool economics while at the same time keeping our 99.99 availability SLA. Below are the current performance parameters for each of the Elastic Database Pool Tier options in preview today:   Basic Elastic Standard Elastic Premium Elastic Elastic Database Pool eDTU range per pool (preview limits) 100-1200 eDTUs 100-1200 eDTUs 125-1500 eDTUs Storage range per pool 10-120 GB 100-1200 GB 63-750 GB Maximum database per pool (preview limits) 200 200 50 Estimated monthly pool and add-on  eDTU costs (preview prices) Starting at $0.2/hr (~$149/pool/mo). Each additional eDTU $.002/hr (~$1.49/mo) Starting at $0.3/hr (~$223/pool mo).  Each additional eDTU $0.003/hr (~$2.23/mo) Starting at $0.937/hr (`$697/pool/mo). Each additional eDTU $0.0075/hr (~$5.58/mo) Storage per eDTU 0.1 GB per eDTU 1 GB per eDTU .5 GB per eDTU Elastic Databases eDTU max per database (preview limits) 0-5 0-100 0-1000 Storage max per DB 2 GB 250 GB 500 GB Per DB cost (preview prices) $0.0003/hr (~$0.22/mo) $0.0017/hr (~$1.26/mo) $0.0084/hr (~$6.25/mo) We’ll continue to iterate on the above parameters and increase the maximum number of databases per pool as we progress through the preview, and would love your feedback as we do so. New Higher-Scale SQL Database Performance Tiers In addition to the enhancements for Elastic Database Pools, we are also today releasing new SQL Database Premium performance tier options for standalone databases.  Today we are adding a new P4 (500 DTU) and a P11 (1750 DTU) level which provide even higher performance database options for SQL Databases that want to scale-up. The new P11 edition also now supports databases up to 1TB in size. Developers can now choose from 10 different SQL Database Performance levels.  You can easily scale-up/scale-down as needed at any point without database downtime or interruption.  Each database performance tier supports a 99.99% SLA, multiple-high availability replica support built-in with no extra charges (meaning you don’t need to buy multiple instances to get an SLA – this is built-into each database), no down-time during patching, point-in-time recovery options (restore without needing a backup), TDE encryption of data, row-level security, and full-text search. Learn More You can learn more about SQL Databases by visiting the http://azure.microsoft.com web-site.  Check out the SQL Database product page to learn more about the capabilities SQL Databases provide, as well as read the technical documentation to learn more how to build great applications using it. Summary Today’s database updates enable developers to build even better cloud applications, and to use data to make them even richer more intelligent.  We are really looking forward to seeing the solutions you build. Hope this helps, Scott [Less]

Today we are making available several new SQL Database capabilities in Azure that enable you to build even better cloud applications.  In particular: We are introducing two new pricing tiers for our  Elastic Database Pool capability.  Elastic ... [More] Database Pools enable you to run multiple, isolated and independent databases on a private pool of resources dedicated to just you and your apps.  This provides a great way for software-as-a-service (SaaS) developers to better isolate their individual customers in an economical way. We are also introducing new higher-end scale options for SQL Databases that enable you to run even larger databases with significantly more compute + storage + networking resources. Both of these additions are available to start using immediately.  Elastic Database Pools If you are a SaaS developer with tens, hundreds, or even thousands of databases, an elastic database pool dramatically simplifies the process of creating, maintaining, and managing performance across these databases within a budget that you control.  A common SaaS application pattern (especially for B2B SaaS apps) is for the SaaS app to use a different database to store data for each customer.  This has the benefit of isolating the data for each customer separately (and enables each customer’s data to be encrypted separately, backed-up separately, etc).  While this pattern is great from an isolation and security perspective, each database can end up having varying and unpredictable resource consumption (CPU/IO/Memory patterns), and because the peaks and valleys for each customer might be difficult to predict, it is hard to know how much resources to provision.  Developers were previously faced with two options: either over-provision database resources based on peak usage--and overpay. Or under-provision to save cost--at the expense of performance and customer satisfaction during peaks. Microsoft created elastic database pools specifically to help developers solve this problem.  With Elastic Database Pools you can allocate a shared pool of database resources (CPU/IO/Memory), and then create and run multiple isolated databases on top of this pool.  You can set minimum and maximum performance SLA limits of your choosing for each database you add into the pool (ensuring that none of the databases unfairly impacts other databases in your pool).  Our management APIs also make it much easier to script and manage these multiple databases together, as well as optionally execute queries that span across them (useful for a variety operations).  And best of all when you add multiple databases to an Elastic Database Pool, you are able to average out the typical utilization load (because each of your customers tend to have different peaks and valleys) and end up requiring far fewer database resources (and spend less money as a result) than you would if you ran each database separately. The below chart shows a typical example of what we see when SaaS developers take advantage of the Elastic Pool capability.  Each individual database they have has different peaks and valleys in terms of utilization.  As you combine multiple of these databases into an Elastic Pool the peaks and valleys tend to normalize out (since they often happen at different times) to require much less overall resources that you would need if each database was resourced separately: Because Elastic Database Pools are built using our SQL Database service, you also get to take advantage of all of the underlying database as a service capabilities that are built into it: 99.99% SLA, multiple-high availability replica support built-in with no extra charges, no down-time during patching, geo-replication, point-in-time recovery, TDE encryption of data, row-level security, full-text search, and much more.  The end result is a really nice database platform that provides a lot of flexibility, as well as the ability to save money. New Basic and Premium Tiers for Elastic Database Pools Earlier this year at the //Build conference we announced our new Elastic Database Pool support in Azure and entered public preview with the Standard Tier edition of it.  The Standard Tier allows individual databases within the elastic pool to burst up to 100 eDTUs (a DTU represents a combination of Compute + IO + Storage performance) for performance.  Today we are adding additional Basic and Premium Elastic Database Pools to the preview to enable a wider range of performance and cost options. Basic Elastic Database Pools are great for light-usage SaaS scenarios.  Basic Elastic Database Pools allows individual databases performance bursts up to 5 eDTUs. Premium Elastic Database Pools are designed for databases that require the highest performance per database. Premium Elastic Database Pools allows individual database performance bursts up to 1,000 eDTUs. Collectively we think these three Elastic Database Pool pricing tier options provide a tremendous amount of flexibility and optionality for SaaS developers to take advantage of, and are designed to enable a wide variety of different scenarios. Easily Migrate Databases Between Pricing Tiers One of the cool capabilities we support is the ability to easily migrate an individual database between different Elastic Database Pools (including ones with different pricing tiers).  For example, if you were a SaaS developer you could start a customer out with a trial edition of your application – and choose to run the database that backs it within a Basic Elastic Database Pool to run it super cost effectively.  As the customer’s usage grows you could then auto-migrate them to a Standard database pool without customer downtime.  If the customer grows up to require a tremendous amount of resources you could then migrate them to a Premium Database Pool or run their database as a standalone SQL Database with a huge amount of resource capacity. This provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and capability, and enables you to build even better applications. Managing Elastic Database Pools One of the the other nice things about Elastic Database Pools is that the service provides the management capabilities to easily manage large collections of databases without you having to worry about the infrastructure that runs it.    You can create and mange Elastic Database Pools using our Azure Management Portal or via our Command-line tools or REST Management APIs.  With today’s update we are also adding support so that you can use T-SQL to add/remove new databases to/from an elastic pool.  Today’s update also adds T-SQL support for measuring resource utilization of databases within an elastic pool – making it even easier to monitor and track utilization by database. Elastic Database Pool Tier Capabilities During the preview, we have been and will continue to tune a number of parameters that control the density of Elastic Database Pools as we progress through the preview. In particular, the current limits for the number of databases per pool and the number of pool eDTUs is something we plan to steadily increase as we march towards the general availability release.  Our plan is to provide the highest possible density per pool, largest pool sizes, and the best Elastic Database Pool economics while at the same time keeping our 99.99 availability SLA. Below are the current performance parameters for each of the Elastic Database Pool Tier options in preview today:   Basic Elastic Standard Elastic Premium Elastic Elastic Database Pool eDTU range per pool (preview limits) 100-1200 eDTUs 100-1200 eDTUs 125-1500 eDTUs Storage range per pool 10-120 GB 100-1200 GB 63-750 GB Maximum database per pool (preview limits) 200 200 50 Estimated monthly pool and add-on  eDTU costs (preview prices) Starting at $0.2/hr (~$149/pool/mo). Each additional eDTU $.002/hr (~$1.49/mo) Starting at $0.3/hr (~$223/pool mo).  Each additional eDTU $0.003/hr (~$2.23/mo) Starting at $0.937/hr (`$697/pool/mo). Each additional eDTU $0.0075/hr (~$5.58/mo) Storage per eDTU 0.1 GB per eDTU 1 GB per eDTU .5 GB per eDTU Elastic Databases eDTU max per database (preview limits) 0-5 0-100 0-1000 Storage max per DB 2 GB 250 GB 500 GB Per DB cost (preview prices) $0.0003/hr (~$0.22/mo) $0.0017/hr (~$1.26/mo) $0.0084/hr (~$6.25/mo) We’ll continue to iterate on the above parameters and increase the maximum number of databases per pool as we progress through the preview, and would love your feedback as we do so. New Higher-Scale SQL Database Performance Tiers In addition to the enhancements for Elastic Database Pools, we are also today releasing new SQL Database Premium performance tier options for standalone databases.  Today we are adding a new P4 (500 DTU) and a P11 (1750 DTU) level which provide even higher performance database options for SQL Databases that want to scale-up. The new P11 edition also now supports databases up to 1TB in size. Developers can now choose from 10 different SQL Database Performance levels.  You can easily scale-up/scale-down as needed at any point without database downtime or interruption.  Each database performance tier supports a 99.99% SLA, multiple-high availability replica support built-in with no extra charges (meaning you don’t need to buy multiple instances to get an SLA – this is built-into each database), no down-time during patching, point-in-time recovery options (restore without needing a backup), TDE encryption of data, row-level security, and full-text search. Learn More You can learn more about SQL Databases by visiting the http://azure.microsoft.com web-site.  Check out the SQL Database product page to learn more about the capabilities SQL Databases provide, as well as read the technical documentation to learn more how to build great applications using it. Summary Today’s database updates enable developers to build even better cloud applications, and to use data to make them even richer more intelligent.  We are really looking forward to seeing the solutions you build. Hope this helps, Scott [Less]

Today we are making available several new SQL Database capabilities in Azure that enable you to build even better cloud applications.  In particular: We are introducing two new pricing tiers for our  Elastic Database Pool capability.  Elastic ... [More] Database Pools enable you to run multiple, isolated and independent databases on a private pool of resources dedicated to just you and your apps.  This provides a great way for software-as-a-service (SaaS) developers to better isolate their individual customers in an economical way. We are also introducing new higher-end scale options for SQL Databases that enable you to run even larger databases with significantly more compute + storage + networking resources. Both of these additions are available to start using immediately.  Elastic Database Pools If you are a SaaS developer with tens, hundreds, or even thousands of databases, an elastic database pool dramatically simplifies the process of creating, maintaining, and managing performance across these databases within a budget that you control.  A common SaaS application pattern (especially for B2B SaaS apps) is for the SaaS app to use a different database to store data for each customer.  This has the benefit of isolating the data for each customer separately (and enables each customer’s data to be encrypted separately, backed-up separately, etc).  While this pattern is great from an isolation and security perspective, each database can end up having varying and unpredictable resource consumption (CPU/IO/Memory patterns), and because the peaks and valleys for each customer might be difficult to predict, it is hard to know how much resources to provision.  Developers were previously faced with two options: either over-provision database resources based on peak usage--and overpay. Or under-provision to save cost--at the expense of performance and customer satisfaction during peaks. Microsoft created elastic database pools specifically to help developers solve this problem.  With Elastic Database Pools you can allocate a shared pool of database resources (CPU/IO/Memory), and then create and run multiple isolated databases on top of this pool.  You can set minimum and maximum performance SLA limits of your choosing for each database you add into the pool (ensuring that none of the databases unfairly impacts other databases in your pool).  Our management APIs also make it much easier to script and manage these multiple databases together, as well as optionally execute queries that span across them (useful for a variety operations).  And best of all when you add multiple databases to an Elastic Database Pool, you are able to average out the typical utilization load (because each of your customers tend to have different peaks and valleys) and end up requiring far fewer database resources (and spend less money as a result) than you would if you ran each database separately. The below chart shows a typical example of what we see when SaaS developers take advantage of the Elastic Pool capability.  Each individual database they have has different peaks and valleys in terms of utilization.  As you combine multiple of these databases into an Elastic Pool the peaks and valleys tend to normalize out (since they often happen at different times) to require much less overall resources that you would need if each database was resourced separately: Because Elastic Database Pools are built using our SQL Database service, you also get to take advantage of all of the underlying database as a service capabilities that are built into it: 99.99% SLA, multiple-high availability replica support built-in with no extra charges, no down-time during patching, geo-replication, point-in-time recovery, TDE encryption of data, row-level security, full-text search, and much more.  The end result is a really nice database platform that provides a lot of flexibility, as well as the ability to save money. New Basic and Premium Tiers for Elastic Database Pools Earlier this year at the //Build conference we announced our new Elastic Database Pool support in Azure and entered public preview with the Standard Tier edition of it.  The Standard Tier allows individual databases within the elastic pool to burst up to 100 eDTUs (a DTU represents a combination of Compute + IO + Storage performance) for performance.  Today we are adding additional Basic and Premium Elastic Database Pools to the preview to enable a wider range of performance and cost options. Basic Elastic Database Pools are great for light-usage SaaS scenarios.  Basic Elastic Database Pools allows individual databases performance bursts up to 5 eDTUs. Premium Elastic Database Pools are designed for databases that require the highest performance per database. Premium Elastic Database Pools allows individual database performance bursts up to 1,000 eDTUs. Collectively we think these three Elastic Database Pool pricing tier options provide a tremendous amount of flexibility and optionality for SaaS developers to take advantage of, and are designed to enable a wide variety of different scenarios. Easily Migrate Databases Between Pricing Tiers One of the cool capabilities we support is the ability to easily migrate an individual database between different Elastic Database Pools (including ones with different pricing tiers).  For example, if you were a SaaS developer you could start a customer out with a trial edition of your application – and choose to run the database that backs it within a Basic Elastic Database Pool to run it super cost effectively.  As the customer’s usage grows you could then auto-migrate them to a Standard database pool without customer downtime.  If the customer grows up to require a tremendous amount of resources you could then migrate them to a Premium Database Pool or run their database as a standalone SQL Database with a huge amount of resource capacity. This provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and capability, and enables you to build even better applications. Managing Elastic Database Pools One of the the other nice things about Elastic Database Pools is that the service provides the management capabilities to easily manage large collections of databases without you having to worry about the infrastructure that runs it.    You can create and mange Elastic Database Pools using our Azure Management Portal or via our Command-line tools or REST Management APIs.  With today’s update we are also adding support so that you can use T-SQL to add/remove new databases to/from an elastic pool.  Today’s update also adds T-SQL support for measuring resource utilization of databases within an elastic pool – making it even easier to monitor and track utilization by database. Elastic Database Pool Tier Capabilities During the preview, we have been and will continue to tune a number of parameters that control the density of Elastic Database Pools as we progress through the preview. In particular, the current limits for the number of databases per pool and the number of pool eDTUs is something we plan to steadily increase as we march towards the general availability release.  Our plan is to provide the highest possible density per pool, largest pool sizes, and the best Elastic Database Pool economics while at the same time keeping our 99.99 availability SLA. Below are the current performance parameters for each of the Elastic Database Pool Tier options in preview today:   Basic Elastic Standard Elastic Premium Elastic Elastic Database Pool eDTU range per pool (preview limits) 100-1200 eDTUs 100-1200 eDTUs 125-1500 eDTUs Storage range per pool 10-120 GB 100-1200 GB 63-750 GB Maximum database per pool (preview limits) 200 200 50 Estimated monthly pool and add-on  eDTU costs (preview prices) Starting at $0.2/hr (~$149/pool/mo). Each additional eDTU $.002/hr (~$1.49/mo) Starting at $0.3/hr (~$223/pool mo).  Each additional eDTU $0.003/hr (~$2.23/mo) Starting at $0.937/hr (`$697/pool/mo). Each additional eDTU $0.0075/hr (~$5.58/mo) Storage per eDTU 0.1 GB per eDTU 1 GB per eDTU .5 GB per eDTU Elastic Databases eDTU max per database (preview limits) 0-5 0-100 0-1000 Storage max per DB 2 GB 250 GB 500 GB Per DB cost (preview prices) $0.0003/hr (~$0.22/mo) $0.0017/hr (~$1.26/mo) $0.0084/hr (~$6.25/mo) We’ll continue to iterate on the above parameters and increase the maximum number of databases per pool as we progress through the preview, and would love your feedback as we do so. New Higher-Scale SQL Database Performance Tiers In addition to the enhancements for Elastic Database Pools, we are also today releasing new SQL Database Premium performance tier options for standalone databases.  Today we are adding a new P4 (500 DTU) and a P11 (1750 DTU) level which provide even higher performance database options for SQL Databases that want to scale-up. The new P11 edition also now supports databases up to 1TB in size. Developers can now choose from 10 different SQL Database Performance levels.  You can easily scale-up/scale-down as needed at any point without database downtime or interruption.  Each database performance tier supports a 99.99% SLA, multiple-high availability replica support built-in with no extra charges (meaning you don’t need to buy multiple instances to get an SLA – this is built-into each database), no down-time during patching, point-in-time recovery options (restore without needing a backup), TDE encryption of data, row-level security, and full-text search. Learn More You can learn more about SQL Databases by visiting the http://azure.microsoft.com web-site.  Check out the SQL Database product page to learn more about the capabilities SQL Databases provide, as well as read the technical documentation to learn more how to build great applications using it. Summary Today’s database updates enable developers to build even better cloud applications, and to use data to make them even richer more intelligent.  We are really looking forward to seeing the solutions you build. Hope this helps, Scott [Less]

Today we are making available several new SQL Database capabilities in Azure that enable you to build even better cloud applications.  In particular: We are introducing two new pricing tiers for our  Elastic Database Pool capability.  Elastic ... [More] Database Pools enable you to run multiple, isolated and independent databases on a private pool of resources dedicated to just you and your apps.  This provides a great way for software-as-a-service (SaaS) developers to better isolate their individual customers in an economical way. We are also introducing new higher-end scale options for SQL Databases that enable you to run even larger databases with significantly more compute + storage + networking resources. Both of these additions are available to start using immediately.  Elastic Database Pools If you are a SaaS developer with tens, hundreds, or even thousands of databases, an elastic database pool dramatically simplifies the process of creating, maintaining, and managing performance across these databases within a budget that you control.  A common SaaS application pattern (especially for B2B SaaS apps) is for the SaaS app to use a different database to store data for each customer.  This has the benefit of isolating the data for each customer separately (and enables each customer’s data to be encrypted separately, backed-up separately, etc).  While this pattern is great from an isolation and security perspective, each database can end up having varying and unpredictable resource consumption (CPU/IO/Memory patterns), and because the peaks and valleys for each customer might be difficult to predict, it is hard to know how much resources to provision.  Developers were previously faced with two options: either over-provision database resources based on peak usage--and overpay. Or under-provision to save cost--at the expense of performance and customer satisfaction during peaks. Microsoft created elastic database pools specifically to help developers solve this problem.  With Elastic Database Pools you can allocate a shared pool of database resources (CPU/IO/Memory), and then create and run multiple isolated databases on top of this pool.  You can set minimum and maximum performance SLA limits of your choosing for each database you add into the pool (ensuring that none of the databases unfairly impacts other databases in your pool).  Our management APIs also make it much easier to script and manage these multiple databases together, as well as optionally execute queries that span across them (useful for a variety operations).  And best of all when you add multiple databases to an Elastic Database Pool, you are able to average out the typical utilization load (because each of your customers tend to have different peaks and valleys) and end up requiring far fewer database resources (and spend less money as a result) than you would if you ran each database separately. The below chart shows a typical example of what we see when SaaS developers take advantage of the Elastic Pool capability.  Each individual database they have has different peaks and valleys in terms of utilization.  As you combine multiple of these databases into an Elastic Pool the peaks and valleys tend to normalize out (since they often happen at different times) to require much less overall resources that you would need if each database was resourced separately: Because Elastic Database Pools are built using our SQL Database service, you also get to take advantage of all of the underlying database as a service capabilities that are built into it: 99.99% SLA, multiple-high availability replica support built-in with no extra charges, no down-time during patching, geo-replication, point-in-time recovery, TDE encryption of data, row-level security, full-text search, and much more.  The end result is a really nice database platform that provides a lot of flexibility, as well as the ability to save money. New Basic and Premium Tiers for Elastic Database Pools Earlier this year at the //Build conference we announced our new Elastic Database Pool support in Azure and entered public preview with the Standard Tier edition of it.  The Standard Tier allows individual databases within the elastic pool to burst up to 100 eDTUs (a DTU represents a combination of Compute + IO + Storage performance) for performance.  Today we are adding additional Basic and Premium Elastic Database Pools to the preview to enable a wider range of performance and cost options. Basic Elastic Database Pools are great for light-usage SaaS scenarios.  Basic Elastic Database Pools allows individual databases performance bursts up to 5 eDTUs. Premium Elastic Database Pools are designed for databases that require the highest performance per database. Premium Elastic Database Pools allows individual database performance bursts up to 1,000 eDTUs. Collectively we think these three Elastic Database Pool pricing tier options provide a tremendous amount of flexibility and optionality for SaaS developers to take advantage of, and are designed to enable a wide variety of different scenarios. Easily Migrate Databases Between Pricing Tiers One of the cool capabilities we support is the ability to easily migrate an individual database between different Elastic Database Pools (including ones with different pricing tiers).  For example, if you were a SaaS developer you could start a customer out with a trial edition of your application – and choose to run the database that backs it within a Basic Elastic Database Pool to run it super cost effectively.  As the customer’s usage grows you could then auto-migrate them to a Standard database pool without customer downtime.  If the customer grows up to require a tremendous amount of resources you could then migrate them to a Premium Database Pool or run their database as a standalone SQL Database with a huge amount of resource capacity. This provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and capability, and enables you to build even better applications. Managing Elastic Database Pools One of the the other nice things about Elastic Database Pools is that the service provides the management capabilities to easily manage large collections of databases without you having to worry about the infrastructure that runs it.    You can create and mange Elastic Database Pools using our Azure Management Portal or via our Command-line tools or REST Management APIs.  With today’s update we are also adding support so that you can use T-SQL to add/remove new databases to/from an elastic pool.  Today’s update also adds T-SQL support for measuring resource utilization of databases within an elastic pool – making it even easier to monitor and track utilization by database. Elastic Database Pool Tier Capabilities During the preview, we have been and will continue to tune a number of parameters that control the density of Elastic Database Pools as we progress through the preview. In particular, the current limits for the number of databases per pool and the number of pool eDTUs is something we plan to steadily increase as we march towards the general availability release.  Our plan is to provide the highest possible density per pool, largest pool sizes, and the best Elastic Database Pool economics while at the same time keeping our 99.99 availability SLA. Below are the current performance parameters for each of the Elastic Database Pool Tier options in preview today:   Basic Elastic Standard Elastic Premium Elastic Elastic Database Pool eDTU range per pool (preview limits) 100-1200 eDTUs 100-1200 eDTUs 125-1500 eDTUs Storage range per pool 10-120 GB 100-1200 GB 63-750 GB Maximum database per pool (preview limits) 200 200 50 Estimated monthly pool and add-on  eDTU costs (preview prices) Starting at $0.2/hr (~$149/pool/mo). Each additional eDTU $.002/hr (~$1.49/mo) Starting at $0.3/hr (~$223/pool mo).  Each additional eDTU $0.003/hr (~$2.23/mo) Starting at $0.937/hr (`$697/pool/mo). Each additional eDTU $0.0075/hr (~$5.58/mo) Storage per eDTU 0.1 GB per eDTU 1 GB per eDTU .5 GB per eDTU Elastic Databases eDTU max per database (preview limits) 0-5 0-100 0-1000 Storage max per DB 2 GB 250 GB 500 GB Per DB cost (preview prices) $0.0003/hr (~$0.22/mo) $0.0017/hr (~$1.26/mo) $0.0084/hr (~$6.25/mo) We’ll continue to iterate on the above parameters and increase the maximum number of databases per pool as we progress through the preview, and would love your feedback as we do so. New Higher-Scale SQL Database Performance Tiers In addition to the enhancements for Elastic Database Pools, we are also today releasing new SQL Database Premium performance tier options for standalone databases.  Today we are adding a new P4 (500 DTU) and a P11 (1750 DTU) level which provide even higher performance database options for SQL Databases that want to scale-up. The new P11 edition also now supports databases up to 1TB in size. Developers can now choose from 10 different SQL Database Performance levels.  You can easily scale-up/scale-down as needed at any point without database downtime or interruption.  Each database performance tier supports a 99.99% SLA, multiple-high availability replica support built-in with no extra charges (meaning you don’t need to buy multiple instances to get an SLA – this is built-into each database), no down-time during patching, point-in-time recovery options (restore without needing a backup), TDE encryption of data, row-level security, and full-text search. Learn More You can learn more about SQL Databases by visiting the http://azure.microsoft.com web-site.  Check out the SQL Database product page to learn more about the capabilities SQL Databases provide, as well as read the technical documentation to learn more how to build great applications using it. Summary Today’s database updates enable developers to build even better cloud applications, and to use data to make them even richer more intelligent.  We are really looking forward to seeing the solutions you build. Hope this helps, Scott [Less]

Today we are making available several new SQL Database capabilities in Azure that enable you to build even better cloud applications.  In particular: We are introducing two new pricing tiers for our  Elastic Database Pool capability.  Elastic ... [More] Database Pools enable you to run multiple, isolated and independent databases on a private pool of resources dedicated to just you and your apps.  This provides a great way for software-as-a-service (SaaS) developers to better isolate their individual customers in an economical way. We are also introducing new higher-end scale options for SQL Databases that enable you to run even larger databases with significantly more compute + storage + networking resources. Both of these additions are available to start using immediately.  Elastic Database Pools If you are a SaaS developer with tens, hundreds, or even thousands of databases, an elastic database pool dramatically simplifies the process of creating, maintaining, and managing performance across these databases within a budget that you control.  A common SaaS application pattern (especially for B2B SaaS apps) is for the SaaS app to use a different database to store data for each customer.  This has the benefit of isolating the data for each customer separately (and enables each customer’s data to be encrypted separately, backed-up separately, etc).  While this pattern is great from an isolation and security perspective, each database can end up having varying and unpredictable resource consumption (CPU/IO/Memory patterns), and because the peaks and valleys for each customer might be difficult to predict, it is hard to know how much resources to provision.  Developers were previously faced with two options: either over-provision database resources based on peak usage--and overpay. Or under-provision to save cost--at the expense of performance and customer satisfaction during peaks. Microsoft created elastic database pools specifically to help developers solve this problem.  With Elastic Database Pools you can allocate a shared pool of database resources (CPU/IO/Memory), and then create and run multiple isolated databases on top of this pool.  You can set minimum and maximum performance SLA limits of your choosing for each database you add into the pool (ensuring that none of the databases unfairly impacts other databases in your pool).  Our management APIs also make it much easier to script and manage these multiple databases together, as well as optionally execute queries that span across them (useful for a variety operations).  And best of all when you add multiple databases to an Elastic Database Pool, you are able to average out the typical utilization load (because each of your customers tend to have different peaks and valleys) and end up requiring far fewer database resources (and spend less money as a result) than you would if you ran each database separately. The below chart shows a typical example of what we see when SaaS developers take advantage of the Elastic Pool capability.  Each individual database they have has different peaks and valleys in terms of utilization.  As you combine multiple of these databases into an Elastic Pool the peaks and valleys tend to normalize out (since they often happen at different times) to require much less overall resources that you would need if each database was resourced separately: Because Elastic Database Pools are built using our SQL Database service, you also get to take advantage of all of the underlying database as a service capabilities that are built into it: 99.99% SLA, multiple-high availability replica support built-in with no extra charges, no down-time during patching, geo-replication, point-in-time recovery, TDE encryption of data, row-level security, full-text search, and much more.  The end result is a really nice database platform that provides a lot of flexibility, as well as the ability to save money. New Basic and Premium Tiers for Elastic Database Pools Earlier this year at the //Build conference we announced our new Elastic Database Pool support in Azure and entered public preview with the Standard Tier edition of it.  The Standard Tier allows individual databases within the elastic pool to burst up to 100 eDTUs (a DTU represents a combination of Compute + IO + Storage performance) for performance.  Today we are adding additional Basic and Premium Elastic Database Pools to the preview to enable a wider range of performance and cost options. Basic Elastic Database Pools are great for light-usage SaaS scenarios.  Basic Elastic Database Pools allows individual databases performance bursts up to 5 eDTUs. Premium Elastic Database Pools are designed for databases that require the highest performance per database. Premium Elastic Database Pools allows individual database performance bursts up to 1,000 eDTUs. Collectively we think these three Elastic Database Pool pricing tier options provide a tremendous amount of flexibility and optionality for SaaS developers to take advantage of, and are designed to enable a wide variety of different scenarios. Easily Migrate Databases Between Pricing Tiers One of the cool capabilities we support is the ability to easily migrate an individual database between different Elastic Database Pools (including ones with different pricing tiers).  For example, if you were a SaaS developer you could start a customer out with a trial edition of your application – and choose to run the database that backs it within a Basic Elastic Database Pool to run it super cost effectively.  As the customer’s usage grows you could then auto-migrate them to a Standard database pool without customer downtime.  If the customer grows up to require a tremendous amount of resources you could then migrate them to a Premium Database Pool or run their database as a standalone SQL Database with a huge amount of resource capacity. This provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and capability, and enables you to build even better applications. Managing Elastic Database Pools One of the the other nice things about Elastic Database Pools is that the service provides the management capabilities to easily manage large collections of databases without you having to worry about the infrastructure that runs it.    You can create and mange Elastic Database Pools using our Azure Management Portal or via our Command-line tools or REST Management APIs.  With today’s update we are also adding support so that you can use T-SQL to add/remove new databases to/from an elastic pool.  Today’s update also adds T-SQL support for measuring resource utilization of databases within an elastic pool – making it even easier to monitor and track utilization by database. Elastic Database Pool Tier Capabilities During the preview, we have been and will continue to tune a number of parameters that control the density of Elastic Database Pools as we progress through the preview. In particular, the current limits for the number of databases per pool and the number of pool eDTUs is something we plan to steadily increase as we march towards the general availability release.  Our plan is to provide the highest possible density per pool, largest pool sizes, and the best Elastic Database Pool economics while at the same time keeping our 99.99 availability SLA. Below are the current performance parameters for each of the Elastic Database Pool Tier options in preview today:   Basic Elastic Standard Elastic Premium Elastic Elastic Database Pool eDTU range per pool (preview limits) 100-1200 eDTUs 100-1200 eDTUs 125-1500 eDTUs Storage range per pool 10-120 GB 100-1200 GB 63-750 GB Maximum database per pool (preview limits) 200 200 50 Estimated monthly pool and add-on  eDTU costs (preview prices) Starting at $0.2/hr (~$149/pool/mo). Each additional eDTU $.002/hr (~$1.49/mo) Starting at $0.3/hr (~$223/pool mo).  Each additional eDTU $0.003/hr (~$2.23/mo) Starting at $0.937/hr (`$697/pool/mo). Each additional eDTU $0.0075/hr (~$5.58/mo) Storage per eDTU 0.1 GB per eDTU 1 GB per eDTU .5 GB per eDTU Elastic Databases eDTU max per database (preview limits) 0-5 0-100 0-1000 Storage max per DB 2 GB 250 GB 500 GB Per DB cost (preview prices) $0.0003/hr (~$0.22/mo) $0.0017/hr (~$1.26/mo) $0.0084/hr (~$6.25/mo) We’ll continue to iterate on the above parameters and increase the maximum number of databases per pool as we progress through the preview, and would love your feedback as we do so. New Higher-Scale SQL Database Performance Tiers In addition to the enhancements for Elastic Database Pools, we are also today releasing new SQL Database Premium performance tier options for standalone databases.  Today we are adding a new P4 (500 DTU) and a P11 (1750 DTU) level which provide even higher performance database options for SQL Databases that want to scale-up. The new P11 edition also now supports databases up to 1TB in size. Developers can now choose from 10 different SQL Database Performance levels.  You can easily scale-up/scale-down as needed at any point without database downtime or interruption.  Each database performance tier supports a 99.99% SLA, multiple-high availability replica support built-in with no extra charges (meaning you don’t need to buy multiple instances to get an SLA – this is built-into each database), no down-time during patching, point-in-time recovery options (restore without needing a backup), TDE encryption of data, row-level security, and full-text search. Learn More You can learn more about SQL Databases by visiting the http://azure.microsoft.com web-site.  Check out the SQL Database product page to learn more about the capabilities SQL Databases provide, as well as read the technical documentation to learn more how to build great applications using it. Summary Today’s database updates enable developers to build even better cloud applications, and to use data to make them even richer more intelligent.  We are really looking forward to seeing the solutions you build. Hope this helps, Scott [Less]

Today we are making available several new SQL Database capabilities in Azure that enable you to build even better cloud applications.  In particular: We are introducing two new pricing tiers for our  Elastic Database Pool capability.  Elastic ... [More] Database Pools enable you to run multiple, isolated and independent databases on a private pool of resources dedicated to just you and your apps.  This provides a great way for software-as-a-service (SaaS) developers to better isolate their individual customers in an economical way. We are also introducing new higher-end scale options for SQL Databases that enable you to run even larger databases with significantly more compute + storage + networking resources. Both of these additions are available to start using immediately.  Elastic Database Pools If you are a SaaS developer with tens, hundreds, or even thousands of databases, an elastic database pool dramatically simplifies the process of creating, maintaining, and managing performance across these databases within a budget that you control.  A common SaaS application pattern (especially for B2B SaaS apps) is for the SaaS app to use a different database to store data for each customer.  This has the benefit of isolating the data for each customer separately (and enables each customer’s data to be encrypted separately, backed-up separately, etc).  While this pattern is great from an isolation and security perspective, each database can end up having varying and unpredictable resource consumption (CPU/IO/Memory patterns), and because the peaks and valleys for each customer might be difficult to predict, it is hard to know how much resources to provision.  Developers were previously faced with two options: either over-provision database resources based on peak usage--and overpay. Or under-provision to save cost--at the expense of performance and customer satisfaction during peaks. Microsoft created elastic database pools specifically to help developers solve this problem.  With Elastic Database Pools you can allocate a shared pool of database resources (CPU/IO/Memory), and then create and run multiple isolated databases on top of this pool.  You can set minimum and maximum performance SLA limits of your choosing for each database you add into the pool (ensuring that none of the databases unfairly impacts other databases in your pool).  Our management APIs also make it much easier to script and manage these multiple databases together, as well as optionally execute queries that span across them (useful for a variety operations).  And best of all when you add multiple databases to an Elastic Database Pool, you are able to average out the typical utilization load (because each of your customers tend to have different peaks and valleys) and end up requiring far fewer database resources (and spend less money as a result) than you would if you ran each database separately. The below chart shows a typical example of what we see when SaaS developers take advantage of the Elastic Pool capability.  Each individual database they have has different peaks and valleys in terms of utilization.  As you combine multiple of these databases into an Elastic Pool the peaks and valleys tend to normalize out (since they often happen at different times) to require much less overall resources that you would need if each database was resourced separately: Because Elastic Database Pools are built using our SQL Database service, you also get to take advantage of all of the underlying database as a service capabilities that are built into it: 99.99% SLA, multiple-high availability replica support built-in with no extra charges, no down-time during patching, geo-replication, point-in-time recovery, TDE encryption of data, row-level security, full-text search, and much more.  The end result is a really nice database platform that provides a lot of flexibility, as well as the ability to save money. New Basic and Premium Tiers for Elastic Database Pools Earlier this year at the //Build conference we announced our new Elastic Database Pool support in Azure and entered public preview with the Standard Tier edition of it.  The Standard Tier allows individual databases within the elastic pool to burst up to 100 eDTUs (a DTU represents a combination of Compute + IO + Storage performance) for performance.  Today we are adding additional Basic and Premium Elastic Database Pools to the preview to enable a wider range of performance and cost options. Basic Elastic Database Pools are great for light-usage SaaS scenarios.  Basic Elastic Database Pools allows individual databases performance bursts up to 5 eDTUs. Premium Elastic Database Pools are designed for databases that require the highest performance per database. Premium Elastic Database Pools allows individual database performance bursts up to 1,000 eDTUs. Collectively we think these three Elastic Database Pool pricing tier options provide a tremendous amount of flexibility and optionality for SaaS developers to take advantage of, and are designed to enable a wide variety of different scenarios. Easily Migrate Databases Between Pricing Tiers One of the cool capabilities we support is the ability to easily migrate an individual database between different Elastic Database Pools (including ones with different pricing tiers).  For example, if you were a SaaS developer you could start a customer out with a trial edition of your application – and choose to run the database that backs it within a Basic Elastic Database Pool to run it super cost effectively.  As the customer’s usage grows you could then auto-migrate them to a Standard database pool without customer downtime.  If the customer grows up to require a tremendous amount of resources you could then migrate them to a Premium Database Pool or run their database as a standalone SQL Database with a huge amount of resource capacity. This provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and capability, and enables you to build even better applications. Managing Elastic Database Pools One of the the other nice things about Elastic Database Pools is that the service provides the management capabilities to easily manage large collections of databases without you having to worry about the infrastructure that runs it.    You can create and mange Elastic Database Pools using our Azure Management Portal or via our Command-line tools or REST Management APIs.  With today’s update we are also adding support so that you can use T-SQL to add/remove new databases to/from an elastic pool.  Today’s update also adds T-SQL support for measuring resource utilization of databases within an elastic pool – making it even easier to monitor and track utilization by database. Elastic Database Pool Tier Capabilities During the preview, we have been and will continue to tune a number of parameters that control the density of Elastic Database Pools as we progress through the preview. In particular, the current limits for the number of databases per pool and the number of pool eDTUs is something we plan to steadily increase as we march towards the general availability release.  Our plan is to provide the highest possible density per pool, largest pool sizes, and the best Elastic Database Pool economics while at the same time keeping our 99.99 availability SLA. Below are the current performance parameters for each of the Elastic Database Pool Tier options in preview today:   Basic Elastic Standard Elastic Premium Elastic Elastic Database Pool eDTU range per pool (preview limits) 100-1200 eDTUs 100-1200 eDTUs 125-1500 eDTUs Storage range per pool 10-120 GB 100-1200 GB 63-750 GB Maximum database per pool (preview limits) 200 200 50 Estimated monthly pool and add-on  eDTU costs (preview prices) Starting at $0.2/hr (~$149/pool/mo). Each additional eDTU $.002/hr (~$1.49/mo) Starting at $0.3/hr (~$223/pool mo).  Each additional eDTU $0.003/hr (~$2.23/mo) Starting at $0.937/hr (`$697/pool/mo). Each additional eDTU $0.0075/hr (~$5.58/mo) Storage per eDTU 0.1 GB per eDTU 1 GB per eDTU .5 GB per eDTU Elastic Databases eDTU max per database (preview limits) 0-5 0-100 0-1000 Storage max per DB 2 GB 250 GB 500 GB Per DB cost (preview prices) $0.0003/hr (~$0.22/mo) $0.0017/hr (~$1.26/mo) $0.0084/hr (~$6.25/mo) We’ll continue to iterate on the above parameters and increase the maximum number of databases per pool as we progress through the preview, and would love your feedback as we do so. New Higher-Scale SQL Database Performance Tiers In addition to the enhancements for Elastic Database Pools, we are also today releasing new SQL Database Premium performance tier options for standalone databases.  Today we are adding a new P4 (500 DTU) and a P11 (1750 DTU) level which provide even higher performance database options for SQL Databases that want to scale-up. The new P11 edition also now supports databases up to 1TB in size. Developers can now choose from 10 different SQL Database Performance levels.  You can easily scale-up/scale-down as needed at any point without database downtime or interruption.  Each database performance tier supports a 99.99% SLA, multiple-high availability replica support built-in with no extra charges (meaning you don’t need to buy multiple instances to get an SLA – this is built-into each database), no down-time during patching, point-in-time recovery options (restore without needing a backup), TDE encryption of data, row-level security, and full-text search. Learn More You can learn more about SQL Databases by visiting the http://azure.microsoft.com web-site.  Check out the SQL Database product page to learn more about the capabilities SQL Databases provide, as well as read the technical documentation to learn more how to build great applications using it. Summary Today’s database updates enable developers to build even better cloud applications, and to use data to make them even richer more intelligent.  We are really looking forward to seeing the solutions you build. Hope this helps, Scott [Less]

Today we are making available several new SQL Database capabilities in Azure that enable you to build even better cloud applications.  In particular: We are introducing two new pricing tiers for our  Elastic Database Pool capability.  Elastic ... [More] Database Pools enable you to run multiple, isolated and independent databases on a private pool of resources dedicated to just you and your apps.  This provides a great way for software-as-a-service (SaaS) developers to better isolate their individual customers in an economical way. We are also introducing new higher-end scale options for SQL Databases that enable you to run even larger databases with significantly more compute + storage + networking resources. Both of these additions are available to start using immediately.  Elastic Database Pools If you are a SaaS developer with tens, hundreds, or even thousands of databases, an elastic database pool dramatically simplifies the process of creating, maintaining, and managing performance across these databases within a budget that you control.  A common SaaS application pattern (especially for B2B SaaS apps) is for the SaaS app to use a different database to store data for each customer.  This has the benefit of isolating the data for each customer separately (and enables each customer’s data to be encrypted separately, backed-up separately, etc).  While this pattern is great from an isolation and security perspective, each database can end up having varying and unpredictable resource consumption (CPU/IO/Memory patterns), and because the peaks and valleys for each customer might be difficult to predict, it is hard to know how much resources to provision.  Developers were previously faced with two options: either over-provision database resources based on peak usage--and overpay. Or under-provision to save cost--at the expense of performance and customer satisfaction during peaks. Microsoft created elastic database pools specifically to help developers solve this problem.  With Elastic Database Pools you can allocate a shared pool of database resources (CPU/IO/Memory), and then create and run multiple isolated databases on top of this pool.  You can set minimum and maximum performance SLA limits of your choosing for each database you add into the pool (ensuring that none of the databases unfairly impacts other databases in your pool).  Our management APIs also make it much easier to script and manage these multiple databases together, as well as optionally execute queries that span across them (useful for a variety operations).  And best of all when you add multiple databases to an Elastic Database Pool, you are able to average out the typical utilization load (because each of your customers tend to have different peaks and valleys) and end up requiring far fewer database resources (and spend less money as a result) than you would if you ran each database separately. The below chart shows a typical example of what we see when SaaS developers take advantage of the Elastic Pool capability.  Each individual database they have has different peaks and valleys in terms of utilization.  As you combine multiple of these databases into an Elastic Pool the peaks and valleys tend to normalize out (since they often happen at different times) to require much less overall resources that you would need if each database was resourced separately: Because Elastic Database Pools are built using our SQL Database service, you also get to take advantage of all of the underlying database as a service capabilities that are built into it: 99.99% SLA, multiple-high availability replica support built-in with no extra charges, no down-time during patching, geo-replication, point-in-time recovery, TDE encryption of data, row-level security, full-text search, and much more.  The end result is a really nice database platform that provides a lot of flexibility, as well as the ability to save money. New Basic and Premium Tiers for Elastic Database Pools Earlier this year at the //Build conference we announced our new Elastic Database Pool support in Azure and entered public preview with the Standard Tier edition of it.  The Standard Tier allows individual databases within the elastic pool to burst up to 100 eDTUs (a DTU represents a combination of Compute + IO + Storage performance) for performance.  Today we are adding additional Basic and Premium Elastic Database Pools to the preview to enable a wider range of performance and cost options. Basic Elastic Database Pools are great for light-usage SaaS scenarios.  Basic Elastic Database Pools allows individual databases performance bursts up to 5 eDTUs. Premium Elastic Database Pools are designed for databases that require the highest performance per database. Premium Elastic Database Pools allows individual database performance bursts up to 1,000 eDTUs. Collectively we think these three Elastic Database Pool pricing tier options provide a tremendous amount of flexibility and optionality for SaaS developers to take advantage of, and are designed to enable a wide variety of different scenarios. Easily Migrate Databases Between Pricing Tiers One of the cool capabilities we support is the ability to easily migrate an individual database between different Elastic Database Pools (including ones with different pricing tiers).  For example, if you were a SaaS developer you could start a customer out with a trial edition of your application – and choose to run the database that backs it within a Basic Elastic Database Pool to run it super cost effectively.  As the customer’s usage grows you could then auto-migrate them to a Standard database pool without customer downtime.  If the customer grows up to require a tremendous amount of resources you could then migrate them to a Premium Database Pool or run their database as a standalone SQL Database with a huge amount of resource capacity. This provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and capability, and enables you to build even better applications. Managing Elastic Database Pools One of the the other nice things about Elastic Database Pools is that the service provides the management capabilities to easily manage large collections of databases without you having to worry about the infrastructure that runs it.    You can create and mange Elastic Database Pools using our Azure Management Portal or via our Command-line tools or REST Management APIs.  With today’s update we are also adding support so that you can use T-SQL to add/remove new databases to/from an elastic pool.  Today’s update also adds T-SQL support for measuring resource utilization of databases within an elastic pool – making it even easier to monitor and track utilization by database. Elastic Database Pool Tier Capabilities During the preview, we have been and will continue to tune a number of parameters that control the density of Elastic Database Pools as we progress through the preview. In particular, the current limits for the number of databases per pool and the number of pool eDTUs is something we plan to steadily increase as we march towards the general availability release.  Our plan is to provide the highest possible density per pool, largest pool sizes, and the best Elastic Database Pool economics while at the same time keeping our 99.99 availability SLA. Below are the current performance parameters for each of the Elastic Database Pool Tier options in preview today:   Basic Elastic Standard Elastic Premium Elastic Elastic Database Pool eDTU range per pool (preview limits) 100-1200 eDTUs 100-1200 eDTUs 125-1500 eDTUs Storage range per pool 10-120 GB 100-1200 GB 63-750 GB Maximum database per pool (preview limits) 200 200 50 Estimated monthly pool and add-on  eDTU costs (preview prices) Starting at $0.2/hr (~$149/pool/mo). Each additional eDTU $.002/hr (~$1.49/mo) Starting at $0.3/hr (~$223/pool mo).  Each additional eDTU $0.003/hr (~$2.23/mo) Starting at $0.937/hr (`$697/pool/mo). Each additional eDTU $0.0075/hr (~$5.58/mo) Storage per eDTU 0.1 GB per eDTU 1 GB per eDTU .5 GB per eDTU Elastic Databases eDTU max per database (preview limits) 0-5 0-100 0-1000 Storage max per DB 2 GB 250 GB 500 GB Per DB cost (preview prices) $0.0003/hr (~$0.22/mo) $0.0017/hr (~$1.26/mo) $0.0084/hr (~$6.25/mo) We’ll continue to iterate on the above parameters and increase the maximum number of databases per pool as we progress through the preview, and would love your feedback as we do so. New Higher-Scale SQL Database Performance Tiers In addition to the enhancements for Elastic Database Pools, we are also today releasing new SQL Database Premium performance tier options for standalone databases.  Today we are adding a new P4 (500 DTU) and a P11 (1750 DTU) level which provide even higher performance database options for SQL Databases that want to scale-up. The new P11 edition also now supports databases up to 1TB in size. Developers can now choose from 10 different SQL Database Performance levels.  You can easily scale-up/scale-down as needed at any point without database downtime or interruption.  Each database performance tier supports a 99.99% SLA, multiple-high availability replica support built-in with no extra charges (meaning you don’t need to buy multiple instances to get an SLA – this is built-into each database), no down-time during patching, point-in-time recovery options (restore without needing a backup), TDE encryption of data, row-level security, and full-text search. Learn More You can learn more about SQL Databases by visiting the http://azure.microsoft.com web-site.  Check out the SQL Database product page to learn more about the capabilities SQL Databases provide, as well as read the technical documentation to learn more how to build great applications using it. Summary Today’s database updates enable developers to build even better cloud applications, and to use data to make them even richer more intelligent.  We are really looking forward to seeing the solutions you build. Hope this helps, Scott [Less]

At DockerCon this year, Mark Russinovich, CTO of Microsoft Azure, demonstrated the first ever application built using code running in both a Windows Server Container and a Linux container connected together. This demo helped demonstrate Microsoft's ... [More] vision that in partnership with Docker, we can help bring the Windows and Linux ecosystems together by enabling developers to build container-based distributed applications using the tools and platforms of their choice. Today we are excited to release the first preview of Windows Server Containers as part of our Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3 release. We’re also announcing great updates from our close collaboration with Docker, including enabling support for the Windows platform in the Docker Engine and a preview of the Docker Engine for Windows. Our Visual Studio Tools for Docker, which we previewed earlier this year, have also been updated to support Windows Server Containers, providing you a seamless end-to-end experience straight from Visual Studio to develop and deploy code to both Windows Server and Linux containers. Last but not least, we’ve made it easy to get started with Windows Server Containers in Azure via a dedicated virtual machine image. Windows Server Containers Windows Server Containers create a highly agile Windows Server environment, enabling you to accelerate the DevOps process to efficiently build and deploy modern applications. With today’s preview release, millions of Windows developers will be able to experience the benefits of containers for the first time using the languages of their choice – whether .NET, ASP.NET, PowerShell or Python, Ruby on Rails, Java and many others. Today’s announcement delivers on the promise we made in partnership with Docker, the fast-growing open platform for distributed applications, to offer container and DevOps benefits to Linux and Windows Server users alike. Windows Server Containers are now part of the Docker open source project, and Microsoft is a founding member of the Open Container Initiative. Windows Server Containers can be deployed and managed either using the Docker client or PowerShell. Getting Started using Visual Studio The preview of our Visual Studio Tools for Docker, which enables developers to build and publish ASP.NET 5 Web Apps or console applications directly to a Docker container, has been updated to include support for today’s preview of Windows Server Containers. The extension automates creating and configuring your container host in Azure, building a container image which includes your application, and publishing it directly to your container host. You can download and install this extension, and read more about it, at the Visual Studio Gallery here: http://aka.ms/vslovesdocker. Once installed, developers can right-click on their projects within Visual Studio and select “Publish”: Doing so will display a Publish dialog which will now include the ability to deploy to a Docker Container (on either a Windows Server or Linux machine): You can choose to deploy to any existing Docker host you already have running: Or use the dialog to create a new Virtual Machine running either Window Server or Linux with containers enabled.  The below screen-shot shows how easy it is to create a new VM hosted on Azure that runs today’s Windows Server 2016 TP3 preview that supports Containers – you can do all of this (and deploy your apps to it) easily without ever having to leave the Visual Studio IDE: Getting Started Using Azure In June of last year, at the first DockerCon, we enabled a streamlined Azure experience for creating and managing Docker hosts in the cloud. Up until now these hosts have only run on Linux. With the new preview of Windows Server 2016 supporting Windows Server Containers, we have enabled a parallel experience for Windows users. Directly from the Azure Marketplace, users can now deploy a Windows Server 2016 virtual machine pre-configured with the container feature enabled and Docker Engine installed. Our quick start guide has all of the details including screen shots and a walkthrough video so take a look here https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/quick_start/azure_setup. Once your container host is up and running, the quick start guide includes step by step guides for creating and managing containers using both Docker and PowerShell. Getting Started Locally Using Hyper-V Creating a virtual machine on your local machine using Hyper-V to act as your container host is now really easy. We’ve published some PowerShell scripts to GitHub that automate nearly the whole process so that you can get started experimenting with Windows Server Containers as quickly as possible. The quick start guide has all of the details at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/quick_start/container_setup. Once your container host is up and running the quick start guide includes step by step guides for creating and managing containers using both Docker and PowerShell. Additional Information and Resources A great list of resources including links to past presentations on containers, blogs and samples can be found in the community section of our documentation. We have also setup a dedicated Windows containers forum where you can provide feedback, ask questions and report bugs. If you want to learn more about the technology behind containers I would highly recommend reading Mark Russinovich’s blog on “Containers: Docker, Windows and Trends” that was published earlier this week. Summary At the //Build conference earlier this year we talked about our plan to make containers a fundamental part of our application platform, and today’s releases are a set of significant steps in making this a reality.’ The decision we made to embrace Docker and the Docker ecosystem to enable this in both Azure and Windows Server has generated a lot of positive feedback and we are just getting started. While there is still more work to be done, now users in the Window Server ecosystem can begin experiencing the world of containers. I highly recommend you download the Visual Studio Tools for Docker, create a Windows Container host in Azure or locally, and try out our PowerShell and Docker support. Most importantly, we look forward to hearing feedback on your experience. Hope this helps, Scott [Less]