You have no idea how much I wanted this…

I’m like a kid on Christmas with this new announcement.  I have had many clients continually ask me about moving their entire solution to the cloud, but with the incomplete BI solution, I would have had to spin up an Azure VM and install SSAS, etc. to get their entire solution in Azure and that was just a convoluted solution.

So with this new development, we can now move their entire BI to the cloud!  Here is the announcement!

Even better, they are using the D1 and S1-S4 billing models with “The developer tier (D1) support[ing] up to 3GB model cache and the largest tier (S4) support[ing] up to 100GB.”  So far, none of the premium building options so we shouldn’t see crazy $10,000 a month bills.

The only immediate downside I see is that this only supports tabular models with support for multidimensional models coming only with enough customer feedback.  So if you are dependent on multidimensional models, make sure to let Microsoft know you want this.  (edit: Kamal Hathi announced during this session that they would in fact support multidimensional models but that may be a mix up.)  Then again, the writing has been on the wall considering that they haven’t really put any new development into the multidimensional models since 2008.

What’s really cool is that it’s the exact same Analysis Services that you get On-Prem!

Regardless of the multidimensional support, this is a huge announcement and I will have more info, demos, how to’s, etc soon.