Provision SQL Managed Instance in under 30 minutes

Edit 11/15/2023
This feature is now Generally Available and subscription/region limitation is removed whilst other remain. 

First instance in a new subnet in under 30 minutes is now live for Dev/Test subscriptions in selected regions. This improvement is the first one in the series of provisioning improvements starting with Feature Wave November 2022. In the near future, we expect to remove the limitation of only the first instance in the new subnet and have any instance provisioned in a similar time frame. Fast provisioning is available to popular configurations that cover most of our users. If you want to create a managed instance in under 30 minutes, once it’s live, you will be able to do so by selecting the following configuration:  

• General Purpose Hardware 
• 4 or 8 vCores 
• default maintenance window 

This improvement is important because it will allow you to quickly respond to business needs. When the situation presents itself, for example, increased demand during holiday peak traffic for an orders database, you will be able to respond in no time. In addition, this will also save costs because you won’t need to have a secondary Managed Instance running just in case of peak traffic happens, but rather you will be able to get one almost instantly. Click here to see the list of all management operations you can perform with your SQL Managed Instance. 

Furthermore, subsequent creations in the subnet, with the same configuration will take only 60 minutes instead of the full 4 hours that was previously the case. This way you can enjoy faster creation times when responding to business needs.  

When you visit Azure portal, right beneath the app bar you will see the message box notifying you that you’re either eligible to be enrolled in the Feature Wave November 2022 or that you are already enrolled. The creation experience remains unchanged except for the fact that you can now get your very first managed instance in a new subnet in approximately 30 minutes.  

To learn more about SQL Managed instance visit aka.ms/learn-sqlmi. 
 

Useful Scenarios to consider 

1. Create SQL Managed Instance for the first time 
   If this is your first-time using SQL Managed Instance, create an instance with the following configuration to minimize cost and maximize utility: 
   1. Hardware: General Purpose Standard Series with 4 vCores 
   2. Optional settings: Keep default Maintenance Window 

2. You want to speed up creation of entire environment through automation 
   You can run your business operations much more efficiently with automation. The same applies to SQL Managed Instance, and as such you can set up scripts to automate creation of SQL Managed Instances through APIs or Terraform. Note that we recommend the configuration described in the use case above for starters or if you’re evaluating an instance with a heavier workload choose an instance with 8 vCores while keeping other configurations the same. Note that it is especially important to set a timeout of 5+ minutes between your create requests to avoid batching. If you create managed instances with less then 5 minutes in between, platform will recognize it as a batched request and you will be put on the batch creation path which, now, does not have fast provisioning.