Windows Azure SQL Reporting being discontinued.

Microsoft have announced that Windows Azure SQL Reporting will be discontinued on 31st October 2014. Along with recommending to migrate reporting instances to SSRS running on virtual machines in Azure.

I’m quite disappointed with this, although having nothing meaty on Azure Reporting Services, I was using it for experimenting on some of my personal projects. And thought it had fantastic promise as a cloud based reporting solution.

As much as I believe PaaS is the better solution, the world is obviously not ready for it, so we will use IaaS for SSRS. Pricing wise it shouldn’t make a huge problem as you can just turn off your VM, and you will not be charged. So with some Powershell scripting and scheduling you will be able to turn on for over night batch processing or manually if you only need reports adhoc (like I do).