Quick tips: How to do more with less in Azure SQL Managed Instance

 

In times of uncertainty and economic downturn, one of the natural moves of individuals and organizations is cutting down their spending. The main question that arises is how to do more with less. In this article we are going to cover a couple of available options that can help in reducing the costs of your SQL Managed Instance. The list includes, but is not limited to:

 

Free Azure SQL Managed Instance

Target: non-production environments

Azure now offers a free deployment of SQL Managed Instance, making it easier than ever to explore its capabilities without upfront cost. Ideal for testing, development, or learning scenarios, this offering provides a fully managed SQL environment with built-in security, high availability, and compatibility with SQL Server - at no charge. It includes:

• General Purpose or Next-gen General Purpose (preview) instance
• Up to 100 databases
• 720 vCore hours per month (does not accumulate)
• 64 GB of storage
• One instance per Azure subscription

Once the monthly vCore limit is reached, the instance is automatically stopped. It restarts when credits renew or can be manually paused to preserve usage. Initially available for Pay-As-You-Go and CSP subscriptions, the free offer has now expanded to include:

• Enterprise Agreement (EA)
• Azure Plan
• Microsoft Azure EA Sponsorship
• Visual Studio subscriptions (Professional, Test Professional, Enterprise)
• Dev/Test subscriptions (Pay-As-You-Go and Enterprise)
• Azure in Open Licensing

This broader availability makes it easier for developers, startups, and enterprise teams to test and evaluate SQL workloads in the cloud. Once you're ready to go live, you can seamlessly convert your free instance to a paid one with a single click - making it production-ready in moments.

 

Azure Dev/Test pricing gives customers access to select Azure services for nonproduction workloads at discounted pricing under the Pay-As-You-Go, Microsoft Customer Agreement, or Enterprise Agreement. This enduring plan reduces the costs of running and managing applications in development and testing environments, across a range of Microsoft products. In Azure SQL Managed Instance, this means that your instance is charged for the compute, storage, and backup storage, but not charged for SQL License, which is ~37% of savings (actual percentage varies per region).

 

How do you sign up for Azure Dev/Test pricing? Here are the options:

 

To learn more about this benefit, visit Azure Dev/Test pricing page.

 

 

With the start-stop capability for General Purpose and Next-gen General Purpose managed instances, you can do cost optimizations of environments that are not running 24/7. No matter if you have a regular or irregular usage patterns, use one of two available commands (manual or scheduled action), and stop your instance when not used. With this, you will save on the compute and license billing, as instances in the stopped state are not charged for vCores and SQL license.

 

To learn more about this capability visit Optimize cost of SQL Managed Instances with new stop-start capability.

 

 

When was the last time you checked the utilization of your SQL Managed Instance? If it’s been a while, you might be surprised by the enhancements now available. The service has evolved significantly, offering a wide range of hardware tuning options to help you find the perfect balance between performance and cost.

In addition to selecting your compute generation, you now have four key configuration sliders to fine-tune your instance:

 

 

Keep in mind that available configurations depend on both the compute generation and the number of vCores selected. For a deeper understanding of these limits and how they apply to your setup, we recommend reviewing the official documentation page for resource limits.

 

 

SQL Managed Instance comes with two different service tiers that represent two different architectures: General Purpose and Business Critical. The main difference between them comes from the storage layer and high availability. In General Purpose service tier remote storage is attached to the compute, and high availability relies on spare virtual machines and service fabric (technology similar to FCI – Failover Cluster Instances in on-premises environments). In Business Critical, instance uses local storage and virtual machines form Always On availability group with service fabric as the availability layer. Business Critical is for most cases more performant, but configurability of TempDB and remote storage file layout can improve the performance of General Purpose service tier as well. So, switching from Business Critical to General Purpose and fine tuning the storage configuration can result in satisfactory performance that fits your workload requirements.

 

 

The General Purpose service tier is getting a major upgrade with the introduction of the Next-generation General Purpose tier, now available in public preview. This update brings a significant improvement by replacing the underlying storage technology used for data and log files in the remote storage architecture - resulting in a more powerful and efficient model.

Best of all, this enhanced tier comes at no additional cost compared to the classic General Purpose tier. We highly recommend evaluating the next-gen version to take advantage of its improved performance and reliability.

 

To learn more about performance adjustments in Azure SQL Managed Instance visit: Tune applications and databases for performance

 

 

Azure Hybrid Benefit allows you to exchange your existing licenses for discounted rates on Azure SQL Managed Instance. You can save up to 30 percent or more on SQL Managed Instance by using your Software Assurance-enabled SQL Server licenses on Azure. With Azure Hybrid Benefit, you pay only for the underlying Azure infrastructure by using your existing SQL Server license for the SQL Server database engine itself (Base Compute pricing). If you do not use Azure Hybrid Benefit, you pay for both the underlying infrastructure and the SQL Server license (License-Included pricing).

 

To learn more about AHB visit Azure Hybrid Benefit - Azure SQL Database & SQL Managed Instance.

 

 

Validation, testing, setting up the production takes time. But once you are there and you have sized your environment right and projected your growth, you will stick with that configuration for quite some time. In this case, the reserved instance pricing is your way to go. Choose between a 1-year or 3-year reservation and save ~35% or ~55% on compute costs. While RI is available for standard series hardware from the very beginning, support for premium series hardware is on its way.

 

To learn more about RI benefits visit:

• Save costs for resources with reserved capacity - Azure SQL Database & SQL Managed Instance,
• Azure Pricing Calculator.

 

 

A lot of industries have strict regulatory requirements about RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective) values. To accommodate this requirement, customers lean toward geo disaster-recovery setup through Failover Groups. In SQL Managed Instance case, this means creating new SQL Managed Instance in another geo-paired region. This results in doubling the cost of the environment as all resources are charged in both locations. Starting from November 2022, this is no longer the case as the SQL license for standby secondary instances is not being charged.

 

To learn more about cost savings with Free Geo-DR license visit What is the Failover rights benefit for GeoDr.

 

 

In this article we went through several options for optimizing the cost of Azure SQL Managed Instance. The good thing is that you don't have to choose one. You can apply multiple options at once and maximize your savings. You could notice that couple of options like start-stop and free license for geo disaster-recovery setup have been released recently, and product group will continue its investment into cost optimization scenarios.

 

Call to action:If you have ideas that you would like to share, feel free to leave comments to this blogpost or contact us using https://aka.ms/contactSQLMI link.