Microsoft recently announced some news regarding Azure. With this blog post I want to point out the two three most important releases.
Azure SQL Database elastic pools generally available
Azure SQL Database elastic pools provide auto-scaling functionality for your Azure SQL Databases. Each pool can contain up to 400 elastic databases and each database can scale up to 1,000 elastic database transaction Units (eDTUs). You can find further information on Azure SQL Database elastic pools in Microsoft’s What is an Azure elastic database pool? documentation.
Azure in Canada generally available
On May 10, 2016, Azure in Canada became GA. As of then, Azure customers in Canada can consume Azure resources from datacenters in Toronto and Quebec City. Make sure to have a look at Microsoft’s Azure Regions webpage to stay up to date on newly announced Azure datacenters and regions that are planned for future release, such as Germany, United Kingdom, South Korea or US Department of Defense. Further Information on Azure in Canada and the planned release in South Korea are provided by Microsoft on the Azure blog.
Update: One more important announcement was made after I first published this blog post:
Recovery Services vault and Azure Backup support for ARM VMs generally available
Recovery Services vault is a unified Azure Resource Manager (ARM) resource to manage your backup and disaster recovery. Recovery Services vault replaces Backup vault and Site Recovery vault and comes with lots of new features such as backup support for ARM VMs or SCDPM and Azure Backup Server to a Recovery Services Vault. The latter Feature in particular is interesting as it enables you to backup your backup server without the need of implementing a second backup layer in your onprem datacenter. Microsoft’s announcement with some more detail can be found in Azure Blog.
Azure and beyond 