Just a word of caution: be very careful to check the latency between the DB tier and the VM tier. We had to abandon a multi-month deployment to Azure because t

Just a word of caution: be very careful to check the latency between the DB tier and the VM tier. We had to abandon a multi-month deployment to Azure because the latency was too high and it caused all sorts of issues with our app. To be honest, our DB access approach wasn't great (heaps of really small requests), but we couldn't re-architect it in the timeframe we had. We were also doing this in Sydney, so maybe it was just a localised issue (the Australian data centres are relatively new). Anyway, hopefully they have that sorted - we need more competition!