If you are using Azure SQL Databases, you should definitely read this post by Brent Ozar: There’s a bottleneck in Azure SQL DB storage throughput. The bottom line:
the transaction log throughput currently appears to bottleneck at 16 cores!
The bit where he compares AWS costs/relative performance is also an eye opener:
- 8 cores,
3,555 per month: 32 minutes (and interestingly, it’s the same speed with zone redundancy enabled) - 80 cores,
1,424 per month with SQL Server Standard Edition licensing: 2 minutes (and I don’t put that in to tout AWS, I just happen to have most of my lab VMs there, so it was a quick comparison)