Microsoft has recently brought its Azure Analysis Services suite to Southeast Asia and East US 2. Regions. The release means more people now have access to the enterprise grade OLAP engine and BI modeling platform. Azure Analysis Services was launched in preview during last October.
This extension of availability means the platform is available in North Europe, West Europe, West US, South Central US, West Central US, East US 2, and Southeast Asia.
If you are unfamiliar with Azure Analysis Services, it is a PaaS that makes it easy for companies to manage data and share it. Microsoft created the platform on the same basis as SQL Server Analysis Services. This allows customers the ability to create BI Semantic Models. With the tools in Azure Analysis, users can use features from the suit in Excel, Power BI, and other services.
Customers using Analysis Services are able to create servers quickly, which pausing and resuming servers is also possible. The platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is compatible with a number of Microsoft services. For example, it is integrated into Azure Active Directory and SQL Server Analysis Services.
Azure Analysis Services Features
When Microsoft launched the platform in preview last October, the company detailed what the PaaS delivers to customers:
- Developers can create a server in seconds, choosing from the Developer (D1) or Standard (S1, S2, S4) service tiers. Each tier comes with fixed capacity in terms of query processing units and model cache. The developer tier (D1) supports up to 3GB model cache and the largest tier (S4) supports up to 100GB.
- The Standard tiers offer dedicated capacity for predictable performance and are recommended for production workloads. The Developer tier is recommended for proof-of-concept, development, and test workloads.
- Administrators can pause and resume the server at any time. No charges are incurred when the server is paused. We also plan to offer administrators the ability to scale up and down a server between the Standard tiers (not available currently).
- Developers can use Azure Active Directory to manage user identity and role based security for their models.
- The service is currently available in the South-Central US and West Europe regions. More regions will be added during the preview.
Microsoft says the platform is important because it bring data information to organizations in a simpler manner. Businesses have easier access to data thanks to BI tools like the company’s own Power BI. With the Azure Analysis Services platforms, users can create models over raw data to share with business users. This makes it easier to access and manage.
Now these abilities are coming to more people with an expanded region roll out.
