As you probably already know, Azure provides a serverless SQL service called SQL Managed Instance.
Well, there is a good news as you can now enjoy a new SKU for free.
Before you start jumping around, you need to know the following limitations/restrictions for the free SQL Managed Instance offer:
- Capacity
- 1 year
- 720 vCore hours of compute every month
- 4 and 8 vCore only
- 64 GB of storage
- Once vCore limit is reached, the instance will be stopped with status “Stopped – Insufficient credit”
- Azure subscription type availability
- Pay As You Go
- CSP
- 1 free SQL instance per subscription
- High availability
- No zone redundancy
- No failover
- Backup
- Between 0 and 7 days only
- Long term retention is not available
- SLA and support
- No SLA
- No support
- Upgrade SKU
- You can’t upgrade from the free SKU to a paid one
- Region availability – probably only during the preview, once GA it may become available in more region
- Australia East
- East US
- East US 2
- North Europe
- Sweeden Central
- Southeast Asia
- South Central US
- UK South
- West Europe
- West US 2
- West US 3
As you can understand, target use case for the free SKU is to provide SQL capabilities for test or development at a cheapest cost.
To provision a free SQL Managed Instance, just connect to your Azure portal (https://portal.azure.com/) and search for SQL Managed Instance to create the instance
On the Basics tab, you should see a purple banner to allow you creating a free SQL MI
By clicking on the Apply free offer you Compute+Storage option will automatically be switched to the free SQL MI offer
