Azure now offers a 99.9 percent service-level agreement (SLA) commitment option on single-instance virtual machines with Premium Storage. Previously, receiving an SLA required a minimum of two virtual machines configured for high availability. However, some IT organizations need SLAs for single-instance virtual machines, forcing those virtual machines to stay on-premises.
With this new option in Azure, Microsoft is empowering organizations to move more workloads to the cloud. To qualify for the single-instance virtual machine SLA, all storage disks attached to the virtual machine must be Azure Premium Storage, which offers up to 80,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 2,000 MB of disk throughput per virtual machine.
Customers can continue to build for high availability by having two or more virtual machines deployed in the same availability set, which provides a 99.95 percent SLA, or by utilizing Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets.
Simplifying Azure 