Azure news this week as heard on the ‘Need to Know‘ podcast.
No more pay as you go
Microsoft is eliminating the pay-as-you-go option for new Azure customers using MPSA (Microsoft Products & Services Agreement) starting February 1 this 2017.
In case you don’t know, the Microsoft Products & Services Agreement (MPSA) is a simplified agreement that provides more flexibility, it consolidates purchasing of Microsoft cloud services, software and Microsoft Software Assurance. It has a Purchasing Account structure that allows for more flexible purchasing options and more control of purchases. You also get multi-year duration options with price protection.
Azure SQL performance improvements
Microsoft today announced major performance improvements for Azure SQL. Microsoft have doubled the write performance across all Azure SQL Database offers and doubled the read performance for their Premium databases. These performance upgrades come with no price change and are available worldwide.
As an example, if you have a Premium workload which is below 50% DTU utilisation now, you may be able to run this in the next lower Premium performance level.
New Azure AD PowerShell module
This update comes because Microsoft wanted to maintain equivalent capabilities between the Graph API & PowerShell cmdlets. Previously you may have used MSOL cmdlets, now you can use AzureAD.
For example:
Instead of Connect-MsolService -credential we would be using Connect-AzureAD.
Instead of Get-MSOLUser we would be using Get-AzureADUser
Marc Kean 