Friday Microsoft announced SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups Supported between Microsoft Azure Regions. This is based on Azure’s new support for VNET-to-VNET connectivity.

This enables two important SQL scenarios:

• User-driven disaster recovery: Client re-connection to remote region using same connection string
• Geo-distributed read scale-out: Offload read workloads to readable secondaries in Azure regions that are closer to the apps (e.g. reporting or BI)

Check out the SQL Server Blog for more information!