The business critical tier for Azure SQL Database Managed Instance is now available. Customers needing a higher level of high availability and disk performance now have the supported option of the business critical tier.

The business critical tier provides customers with three secondary copies of their instance. Two are non-readable and the third provides a readable secondary. I’ve encouraged all my clients to take advantage of the readable secondary to help offload part of their read workload which in turn helps reduce the workload on the primary. The cost of the readable secondary is built in already, so why not utilize it.

The business critical tier also supports up to 200,000 IOPS which is a huge improvement over the general purpose tier. Both general purpose and business critical support anywhere from 8 to 80 vCores. It has been rumored that we may see a smaller size than 8 vCore at some point in the future.

I’m really excited about Managed Instance and all the development that has been going on in the platform-as-a-service space. With advanced threat detection, vulnerability assessment, data classification and discovery, and other features being added to the Azure Portal, we truly have a secure and robust environment to migrate on our premises systems to.