We are happy to announce General availability of Business Critical Tier in Azure Sql Managed Instance - architectural model built for high-performance and IO demanding databases.

After 5 months of public preview period Azure Sql Managed Instance Business Critical Service tier is generally available.

Azure SQL Managed Instance Business Critical tier is built for high performance databases and applications that require low IO latency of 1-2ms in average with up to 100K IOPS that can be achieved using fast local SSD that this tier uses to place database files.

Azure SQL Managed Instance Business Critical tier is a cluster of SQL server database engines with one primary read/write replica, one free-of-charge read-only replica, and two hidden replicas that ensure 99.99% availability.

High availability is implemented using SQL Server Always On technology that ensures that changes made on the primary server are replicated to at least two replicas before the transaction is committed. changes are synchronously written into the log files of secondary nodes.

With Business Critical General availability, we are also enabling a set of new features:

• Managed Instance enables you to specify any server-level collation when you create a new instance.
• You can define Azure Active Directory logins that match your Windows logins.
• You can configure auto-failover group between two managed instances running in different Azure regions.
• You can keep backups used for point-in-time restore up to 35 days and configure backup retention period per database.
• If you want to use Transparent Data Encryption, your can  Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) through the integration with Azure Key Vault,
• A built-in firewall increases security of your Managed Instances.

You can reduce the cost of your Managed Instances up to 80 percent with the Azure Hybrid Benefit and new reserved capacity pricing, which is now available for the Business Critical service tier. For dev-test workloads, we recommend our Enterprise dev-test or Pay-As-You-Go dev-test pricing to save up to 55 percent off license-included rates.

You can find more information about the Managed Instance in General availability announcement blog post and Azure SQL Database documentation page.