Microsoft announces Azure Analysis Services, an enterprise grade OLAP engine and BI modeling platform

Microsoft today announced the launch of Azure Analysis Services, an enterprise grade OLAP engine and BI modeling platform, offered as a fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS). It is based on the proven analytics engine in Microsoft’s SQL Server Analysis Services. This will enable developers and BI professionals to create BI Semantic Models that can power interactive and rich analytical experiences in BI tools (such as Power BI and Excel) and custom applications. They can reduce time-to-insights on large and complex datasets. Fast response times mean their BI solution can meet the needs of your business users and keep pace with their business.

• 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.

Learn more about this service here.