Microsoft has introduced SSD storage for Azure VMs. This is a catch-up with Amazon which has been offering this at least since June 2014. It is an important feature though, and now in preview. The SSDs are part of the Azure storage service but can only be used for disks attached to VMs, not for general-purpose block files. There are three virtual disks available:

Price is $6.90 per 100GB per month, which if I am reading this right is less than Amazon’s $0.10 per GB per month ($10 per 100GB) as shown here.

One obvious use case is for SQL Server running on a VM. This generally performs better than Microsoft’s Azure SQL database service. That said, Microsoft is also previewing an improved Azure SQL which supports most of the features of SQL Server 2014, including .NET stored procedures and in-memory columnstore queries. Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie says performance is better:

Our internal benchmark tests (using over 600 million rows of data) show query performance improvements of around 5x with today’s preview relative to our existing Premium Tier SQL Database offering and up to 100x performance improvements when using the new In-memory columnstore technology.

If you can make it work, Azure SQL is better sense than running SQL Server in a VM with all the hassles of server patching and of course Microsoft’s licensing fees; but the performance has to be there. Another factor which drives users to the VM option is that SQL Reporting Service is not available in Azure SQL.