Azure price cuts, bigger databases, now with node.js and MongoDB support ...
23.05.12
Microsoft has rolled out a big update to its Azure cloud computing platform to make it cheaper, easier to manage, easier to scale, and easier to use with popular open source software.
Full details of the price improvements can be found on the Azure blog . Data transfer costs have been reduced, and the maximum SQL Azure database size has been tripled, to 150GB, with no change in price. Service Bus pricing has also been simplified, with the new pricing effective from April 1st, 2012. Until then, Service Bus will be free.
To improve management, Microsoft has deployed a new Metro-styled management portal for SQL Azure, streamlined the way the service is billed, and provided a new real-time usage tracker. Again, more details are available on the blog .
In addition to the larger database size, SQL Azure now has a new "SQL Azure Federation" feature. This makes it easier to scale out database applications through use of sharding. Sharding is a way of improving database scalability by breaking up tables or databases across multiple servers, with each server holding some subset of the data. As long as the data is spread evenly across the servers, this greatly increases concurrency, as different requests should be sent to different servers, where they can then be fulfilled in parallel. SQL Azure Federation automates the sharding process, allowing new servers to be added and data to be reorganized between shards without interruptions.
Source: Ars Technica