Azure SQL Database has been available for a long time now in its own unique DTU licenced model. As of 4th April it is now also available in a vCore-based Database purchase model, in preview, which will align much more closely with the traditional core-based model of SQL Server licensing that we currently licence by on On Premise or IaaS solutions.
This pricing model, available for both a single database and the elastic pool options, brings more transparency and will make it much easier to capacity plan, migrate and scale into the cloud from our current on premise solutions using SQL Server.
We have two pricing models, General Purpose and Business Critical, and both are currently based on Intel E5-2673 v3 (Haswell) 2.4 GHz processors and a fixed amount of memory. The Business Critical offering you are charged for local SSD storage that you provision for your database and offers the highest resilience to failures using several isolated replicas.
Examples of pricing, as of 6th April 2018, are shown below for the General Purpose pricing tier;
As you can see you can use the Azure Hybrid Benefit to reduce costs for customers with SQL Server Licenses and active Software Assurance.
Once the service is out of preview we should expect an 99.99% uptime for this Azure SQL Database offering.
This is another important step, especially for the popular PaaS solution, for Azure and SQL Server, together offering a multitude of solutions to meet our migration to the cloud needs for our data platform solutions.
Thanks for reading!