Public Preview: Zone-Redundant Next-Gen General Purpose for Azure SQL Managed Instance

Customers can now enjoy the latest General Purpose architecture from Azure SQL Managed Instance alongside robust zone-level resilience, thanks to the public preview of zone redundancy for Next-Generation General Purpose Azure SQL Managed Instance. This means businesses can experience the advantages of the cutting-edge architecture while ensuring they meet strict high availability and compliance standards with Zone protection.

When Next-Generation General Purpose was launched, it brought with it a revamped architecture offering improved performance, impressive scalability, enhanced flexibility, and better cost efficiency for Azure SQL Managed Instance workloads. Since its release, many customers have embraced this architecture to update their SQL workloads, merge databases, and reduce their overall costs.

Now, with zone redundancy in public preview, businesses demanding zone-level resilience can fully leverage the perks of Next-Generation General Purpose while achieving the same availability standards that were previously only available with the Classic General Purpose version.

This significant update offers complete high-availability equivalence between Classic and Next-Generation General Purpose, eliminating one of the last compelling reasons for clients to stay with the older architecture.

Zone redundancy has been one of the most sought-after features for Next-Generation General Purpose since its debut.

From its inception, Next-Generation General Purpose has delivered notable scalability and flexibility enhancements, including support for up to 128 vCores, 32 TB of storage, and the ability to manage up to 500 databases per instance, while offering configurable IOPS and adaptable memory sizes. This enables users to tailor resources to fit their specific workload needs while enjoying the simplicity and compatibility that Azure SQL Managed Instance offers.

With this latest announcement, these powerful capabilities can now be paired with zone-level resilience, allowing customers to implement highly available business-critical workloads on the latest General Purpose architecture seamlessly.

Additionally, the flexible memory option for zone-redundant Next-Generation General Purpose instances is now available in public preview, further enhancing the ability to balance performance with infrastructure expenses.

Azure SQL Managed Instance has consistently been built for high availability.

The Next-Generation General Purpose architecture ensures high availability through its distributed design, using Service Fabric in conjunction with fault domains and update domains. This helps minimise the impact of hardware malfunctions, software updates, and planned maintenance. As a result, applications can stay up and running, even during infrastructure events and maintenance tasks.

This design guarantees a 99.99% availability SLA for single-zone deployments.

For businesses with even stricter availability demands, zone redundancy spreads service components across various Availability Zones within a region. This setup safeguards against zone failures and boosts the availability SLA to 99.995%.

While many applications perform effectively with single-zone deployments, businesses in regulated sectors or critical environments typically need zone-redundant architectures to comply with standards, enhance operational resilience, or meet business continuity needs. The current preview now allows these customers to use Next-Generation General Purpose without compromising those necessities.

Zone redundancy for Next-Generation General Purpose is on public preview in all locations that support the underlying ESAN infrastructure for zone-redundant deployments.

To find out more about supported regions, visit the documentation page highlighting the currently available Elastic SAN regions and their supported redundancy options.

Currently, regions lacking ESAN-based zone redundancy are not included in the preview. As platform support grows, more regions will eventually be accessible.

Whether you’re already using Next-Generation General Purpose or still relying on Classic General Purpose, switching to zone-redundant Next-Generation General Purpose is intended to be an easy and transparent process.

Those already using Next-Generation General Purpose can activate zone redundancy directly on their current instances, enjoying heightened resilience and an improved availability SLA immediately.

For customers utilizing Classic General Purpose with zone redundancy, migrating to Next-Generation General Purpose allows them to maintain zone-level resilience while gaining access to the latest platform architecture and enhancements in flexibility and scalability. This transition provides a natural upgrade path for existing setups, enabling customers to standardise on the future of the General Purpose tier.

Activating zone redundancy or switching between architectures is an online management task.

For most of this process, Azure SQL Managed Instance instantiates and synchronises the new infrastructure while the current deployment continues to serve application traffic. Toward the end of the operation, a brief failover occurs as client connections are rerouted from the existing infrastructure to the new environment.

For additional details about management operations, expected outcomes, and connection considerations, consult the management operations overview article.

For customers in areas where zone redundancy isn’t available yet, or for those needing protection from larger regional outages, Failover Groups are still the recommended solution.

Failover Groups facilitate disaster recovery across Azure regions by maintaining a secondary managed instance, offering automatic failover when necessary. This setup helps organisations meet their business continuity goals even when Availability Zone protections are not feasible or during regional outages.

Those employing disaster recovery with Failover Groups can further optimise expenses through Azure SQL License Free failover rights.

If the secondary managed instance is solely reserved for standby disaster recovery and is not used for read-only tasks, SQL Server licensing fees do not apply. Customers pay only for the computing resources required to maintain disaster recovery readiness, thereby helping to reduce the overall cost of ownership.

The Azure SQL Managed Instance pricing page and Azure Pricing Calculator have been updated to reflect the latest offerings for zone-redundant Next-Generation General Purpose.

These resources can assist customers in evaluating deployment choices, comparing availability architectures, and estimating costs tied to zone redundancy and disaster recovery setups.

The introduction of zone redundancy for Next-Generation General Purpose represents a key advancement in the development of Azure SQL Managed Instance.

Customers can now blend the performance, scalability, flexibility, and operational advantages of Next-Generation General Purpose with zone-level resilience and a 99.995% availability SLA. Whether deploying new workloads, activating zone redundancy on existing Next-Generation General Purpose instances, or modernising Classic General Purpose deployments, organisations have a clear path forward to adopting the latest General Purpose architecture without compromise.

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Next-gen General Purpose – official documentation

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