Azure SQL by Danny

vCore Purchasing Model For Azure SQL Database

A virtual core (vCore) represents a logical CPU and offers you the option to choose between generations of hardware and the physical characteristics of the hardware (for example, the number of cores, the memory, and the storage size). The vCore-based purchasing model gives you flexibility, control, and transparency of individual resource consumption.

In the vCore-based purchasing model, your costs depend on the choice and usage of Service tier like

Hardware configuration
Compute resources (the number of vCores and the amount of memory)
Reserved database storage
Actual backup storage

Use case	General Purpose	Business Critical	Hyperscale
Best for	Most business workloads. Offers budget-oriented, balanced, and scalable compute and storage options.	Offers business applications the highest resilience to failures by using several isolated replicas, and provides the highest I/O performance per database replica.	Most business workloads with highly scalable storage and read-scale requirements. Offers higher resilience to failures by allowing configuration of more than one isolated database replica.
Availability	1 replica, no read-scale replicas, zone-redundant high availability (HA)	3 replicas, 1 read-scale replica, zone-redundant high availability (HA)	zone-redundant high availability (HA) (preview)
Pricing/billing	vCore, reserved storage, and backup storage are charged. IOPS is not charged.	vCore, reserved storage, and backup storage are charged. IOPS is not charged.	vCore for each replica and used storage are charged. IOPS not yet charged.
Discount models	Reserved instances Azure Hybrid Benefit (not available on dev/test subscriptions) Enterprise and Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test subscriptions	Reserved instances Azure Hybrid Benefit (not available on dev/test subscriptions) Enterprise and Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test subscriptions	Azure Hybrid Benefit (not available on dev/test subscriptions) Enterprise and Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test subscriptions