Microsoft has announced the GA date for the Business-Critical tier. Azure SQL Managed Instance Business Critical tier will be generally available on December 1st 2018. For those customers who are needing the ‘Super-Fast’ storage capabilities provided with local SSDs on the instance, you now have a release date. Business Critical also provides the ability to have a readable secondary. Technically, you have three secondaries, two are non-readable and the third can be made available for Read-Scale. All you need to do is enable Read-Scale and update your connection string for read-intent workloads. There is no additional cost for using the readable secondary, so all customers should take advantage of this feature. Offloading some of your read workload to the secondary can free up resources on your primary.
Business critical designed for mission-critical business apps with high I/O requirements, it supports high availability with the highest level of storage and compute redundancy. Something to consider is that Business Critical leverages an Availability Group for HA. General Purpose is built upon Windows Failover Clustering. Both tiers provide HA, however you may experience a slight disruption for the General Purpose failover which still provides good HA, Business Critical you have almost seamless failover providing really good HA.
Mark your calendars for Dec 1st, until then, keep enjoying the preview pricing for your proof of concepts.
If you are considering a migration to Azure SQL Database or Managed Instance and need help, reach out.