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Category: Cloud

Azure Pricing and Exchange Rates

Published 2026-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Thomas Rushton troubleshoots a billing issue:

So you signed up for a three year deal to keep costs down and more predictable.  But while Reservations can make Azure spend more predictable, they can’t make it completely static. You’ll be OK if you’re paying in USD, but if your organisation is billed in any other currency, you’ll be subject to the vagaries of exchange rates when buying any Azure service. 

Read on for a specific instance in which UK customers experienced a fairly significant price change based on the timing of changes in currency exchange rates.

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Granular REST API Support for OneLake Security Role Management

Published 2026-01-23 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Merrill announces a new preview offering:

Microsoft Fabric continues to expand the OneLake security surface with new granular REST API support for role management, giving developers and platform teams far more control over how security policies are created, retrieved, and managed programmatically. In addition to the existing batch role API, Fabric now offers discrete Create, Get, and Delete role APIs, making it easier to build incremental, automation-friendly security workflows that align with modern DevOps and governance practices.

Click through for a quick explanation of how things did work and how they will work going forward.

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Hosting Azure SQL Databases over an Azure VPN

Published 2026-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Aleksey Vitsko doesn’t want public database access:

You have an Azure Point-to-Site (P2S) VPN configured and can successfully connect to your virtual network over VPN. Your SQL resources – such as Azure SQL Database, SQL Managed Instance, or SQL Virtual Machine – are hosted within the virtual network. Your goal is to eliminate the use of public endpoints and rely solely on private connectivity.

Click through to see how.

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Writing Sparse Pandas DataFrames to S3

Published 2026-01-19 by Kevin Feasel

Pooja Chhabra tries a few things:

If you’ve worked with large-scale machine learning pipelines, you must know one of the most frustrating bottlenecks isn’t always found in the complexity of the model or the elegance of the architecture — it’s writing the output efficiently.

Recently, I found myself navigating a complex data engineering hurdle where I needed to write a massive Pandas sparse DataFrame — the high-dimensional output of a CountVectorizer — directly to Amazon S3. By massive, I mean tens of gigabytes of feature data stored in a memory-efficient sparse format that needed to be materialized as a raw CSV file. This legacy requirement existed because our downstream machine learning model was specifically built to ingest only that format, leaving us with a significant I/O challenge that threatened to derail our entire processing timeline.

Read on for two major constraints, a variety of false starts, and what eventually worked.

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IOPS Slider in Azure SQL Managed Instance Next-Gen

Published 2026-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

John Morehouse cranks that slider to the right:

If you’ve used Azure SQL Managed Instance General Purpose, you know the drill: to boost memory or I/O, you had to scale the whole instance, paying for extra CPU you might not need—and hoping the upgrade fixed the bottleneck.

It worked but wasn’t elegant and could be slow or awkward. Scaling sometimes took hours when time was of the essence.

The Next-Gen Azure SQL Managed Instance marks a major shift from the old model. It was way overdue.

The downside is that there’s still a per-CPU hard cap on IOPS and it’s low. Granted, it’s only about two orders of magnitude lower than what I’d expect from a decent on-premises solution, but that’s still enough to limit severely my ability to recommend SQL Managed Instance to anybody.

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Microsoft Fabric Eventstream Pricing

Published 2026-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Anasheh Boisvert puts on the green eyeshade:

In this blog post, we’ll walk through Eventstream’s pricing model to give you a clear understanding of how it works and help you navigate it with confidence.

By the end of this post, you will be able to:

  • Comprehend how Eventstream pricing is structured across its components.
  • Understand the relationship between Eventstream components and billing meters.
  • Review detailed pricing examples to support precise and confident cost estimation.

Read on for a breakdown of the components and several examples.

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Configuring a Point-to-Site VPN in Azure

Published 2026-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

Aleksey Vitsko wants access to private endpoints:

You have resources in Azure (including, but not limited to, Azure SQL), and you have a task at hand to eradicate usage of public endpoints. Security requirements are to start communicating with resources, such as database servers through encrypted VPN channels.

This is the “people in my office will use this” VPN, whereas Azure also has a Point-to-Point VPN for individuals and remote workers.

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Using Fabric Cost Analysis

Published 2026-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra tries out a tool:

Enter Fabric Cost Analysis (FCA) – a free, open-source solution available to everyone on a Microsoft GitHub repository, designed to shine a light on all your Microsoft Fabric costs. FCA was developed by a multidisciplinary team (Cedric Dupui, Manel Omani, Antoine Richet, and led by Romain Casteres) with expertise spanning FinOps, Data, and Go-To-Market, with a clear goal: turn a major adoption barrier into a strategic lever for growth.

Conceived directly from customer questions, FCA answers the things people actually want to know: What are we really paying for? What’s included? Where are the optimization opportunities? It doesn’t just track costs—it builds trust, helps organizations explain spend internally, and ultimately accelerates Fabric adoption.

Read on to see what it includes and how it works.

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An Overview of SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-01-06 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis shares some thoughts:

Now let’s look at an actual transactional database running inside Fabric.

SQL database in Microsoft Fabric became generally available at Ignite in November 2025. This isn’t a data warehouse. It’s not a lakehouse with a SQL endpoint. It’s a real OLTP database — based on the same engine as Azure SQL Database — designed for operational workloads, running as a fully managed SaaS service inside your Fabric capacity.

Read on for some thoughts around capabilities and current limitations.

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