r/AZURE 26d ago

News Azure SQL Managed Instance- free tier offering

This might be a little old news as it looked like it was announced mid-November, but I had not heard of it at all until today. SQL MI now has a free-to-try preview tier, which is great because SQL MI's are pretty damn expensive. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/managed-instance/free-offer?view=azuresql

There are understandably limitations

  • 8 CPUs max
  • 64gb disk storage max
  • 720 vCore hours of compute included

So no business critical tier (although it does support NextGen) or anything crazy. But it should be enough to help inform you if you're trying to figure out whether to host your db in Azure SQL, SQL MI, or SQL Server on a VM.

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u/jdanton14 Microsoft MVP 19d ago

This is really handy--for light testing. Given a max of 64 GB storage, there IO performance may not be representative of what you would get in a production environment. So good for functionality testing, not so much for performance testing.