Cloud customers are getting used to the idea of paying only for what they use while enjoying on-demand performance scaling from their cloud services, and Microsoft added those capabilities to a few of its database products Monday at Microsoft Build.
Both Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure SQL Database can now implement a technology called Hyperscale, which allows customers to build applications knowing they’ll be able to scale database resources in response to a surge in demand. Azure SQL Database customers will also be able to take advantage of a new serverless pricing tier.
Azure Database for PostgreSQL Hyperscale (say that 10 times fast) is one of the first dividends from Microsoft’s acquisition of Citus Data in January. Citus’ technology will be implemented in the Hyperscale version of the database to allow it to scale horizontally across nodes, which is ideal for “workload scenarios that require ingesting and querying data in real-time, with sub-second response times, at any scale – even with billions of rows,” Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president for Azure Data, said in a blog post.
The PostgreSQL Hyperscale version will be available in preview, while Azure SQL Database customers can get started with their Hyperscale version right away. The Azure SQL version allows developers to use a database that scales compute and storage resources as needed, and it also helps improve the how quickly customers can restore an Azure SQL database.
And for Azure SQL Database customers that need to scale compute and memory as needed, Microsoft rolled out a new serverless pricing option that lets developers pay by the second for their usage. Serverless computing is gaining traction across cloud providers as customers look to shed the additional burden of configuring cloud hardware after getting rid of the need to manage hardware in moving to the cloud.
Database technology is an extremely competitive aspect of both cloud and on-premises enterprise technology, and for good reason, given the importance of data and the complexity of storing data under the right conditions for an application. Last week ahead of Build Microsoft announced a new edge computing database called Azure SQL Database Edge, and two years ago it introduced its flagship cloud database Azure Cosmos DB at Build.
