Microsoft today announced the general availability of the S3 tier of Azure Search. S3 tier is designed to handle large volumes of documents and heavy traffic. Identically priced and backed by the same high performance CPUs and SSD storage, the S3 tier comes in two configurations: S3 and S3 High Density (HD).
S3
The standard S3 tier of Azure Search is suited for customers with large numbers of documents and can handle many hundreds of queries per second. With each partition supporting 120 million documents (or 200 GB), it is possible to search up to 1.4 billion documents (or 2.4TB) in a single search service while still maintaining low latency for high query volumes.
S3 High Density
The S3 HD tier is targeted at ISVs and SaaS providers who build applications which support a large number of relatively small indexes in a single search service. In fact, Microsoft Dynamics 365 has been using Azure Search’s S3 HD tier to power its search experience for thousands of its online customers.
Microsoft also announced new regions for Azure Search. It is now available in Canada Central and West Central US. Azure Search can be provisioned in 14 regions: East US, West US, North Central US, South Central US, West Central US, North Europe, West Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Japan West, Brazil South, Australia East, Central India, and Canada Central.