Azure database services for MySQL and PostgreSQL are fully managed, enterprise-ready services built using community version of MySQL and PostgreSQL database engines respectively. These services come with built-in high availability and ability to elastically scale compute and storage independently in seconds, helping you to easily adjust resources and respond faster to market and customer demands. Additionally, you benefit from unparalleled security and compliance, Azure IP advantage, as well as Azure’s industry leading global reach.
Since we announced these services in preview last year, users have been providing feedback helping drive product improvements and new features. As part of executing on customer feedback, I am really excited to announce the changes to the pricing model that will provide customers with more flexibility and help optimize costs.
Pricing tiers
Since the preview launch, we have been offering the Basic and Standard pricing tiers. We are continuing with the Basic tier, re-naming Standard to General Purpose and introducing a new premium tier called Memory Optimized to cater to workloads requiring faster in-memory performance. For more information about the General Purpose and Memory Optimized tiers, and when to use them, visit MySQL and PostgreSQL documentation.
Changing from “compute units” to vCores
Beginning today you will be provisioning compute in vCores instead of “compute units”. vCores represent the logical CPU of the underlying hardware. Currently, two compute generations, Gen 4 and Gen 5, are offered for you to choose from (may vary based on the deployment region you choose). Gen 4 logical CPUs are based on Intel E5-2673 v3 (Haswell) 2.4 GHz processors. Gen 5 logical CPUs are based on Intel E5-2673 v4 (Broadwell) 2.3 GHz processors. The General Purpose tier now supports up to 32 vCores, using either Gen 4 or Gen 5. The Memory Optimized tier is only offered on Gen 5 and supports up to 32 vCores.
Flexibly configure and scale storage
Now users can provision a server with as little as 5 GB of storage. You can also increase storage on existing or new MySQL and PostgreSQL servers in 1 GB increments without any downtime to your application.
Additional options for backup and geo-restore
Backup retention period can now be configured between 7 and 35 days across all pricing tiers. In addition, for General Purpose and Memory Optimized tiers, you can opt for geo-redundant storage for backups. Geo-redundant storage allows you to use the backups to restore your server to any Azure region in the event of a disaster. For more information, visit MySQL and PostgreSQL documentation.
What does it mean for you?
Existing MySQL and PostgreSQL servers will transparently move to the new vCore and storage model. The mapping from old compute units to the new vCores is as follows:
| Basic (compute units) | Basic (vCores) |
| 50 | 1 |
| 100 | 2 |
| Standard (compute units) | General Purpose (vCores) |
| 100 | 2 |
| 200 | 4 |
| 400 | 8 |
| 800 | 16 |
The backup retention period for all existing MySQL and PostgreSQL Standard servers will be set to 35 days by default using geo-redundant backup storage. Existing Basic MySQL and PostgreSQL servers will be set to 7 days by default using locally redundant backup storage. You can configure the backup retention period to any value between 7 and 35 days.
Resources
Get started and create your MySQL and PostgreSQL servers today!
Learn more about Azure Database for MySQL on the overview and pricing pages.
Learn more about Azure Database for PostgreSQL on the overview and pricing pages.
Sunil Kamath
Twitter: @kamathsun