Microsoft Azure for MySQL does not provide a stable high availability solution with failover, though Read replicas can be used. To fully utilize the read replicas without application changes, a 3rd-party proxy would be needed, and geo-distributed Azure MySQL basically does not exist.

Local High Availability (HA)

Requires maintenance windows and downtime. 60-120 seconds of downtime with DNS change.

Multi-Region and DR

No automation. Must manually stop the Master which takes two (2) minutes, and repoint applications to Slave.

Scalability

Read replica scaling is supported. Restricted to Azure infrastructure only.

Performance

Requires application changes or a 3rd party MySQL proxy for load balancing.

Deployment and Application Changes

Easy to deploy. May require application changes for performance improvements.

TCO

Linear pricing, very expensive Enterprise 24/7 support.

MySQL Version

MySQL Community Edition 5.6, 5.7, 8.0 (only 5.7 for flexible server preview).

Infrastructure and Platform

Azure only.

Completeness

Comes with components but each are lacking functionality, some components in preview only.

Maturity

March 2018.

Security

Can be used in PCI and HIPAA compliance.

Management and Monitoring

Monitoring is very basic, GUI can only view one region at a time.