SQL Azure federation provides tools that allow developers to scale out (by sharding) in SQL Azure.
Here are some of the benefits of a sharded database:
- Taking advantage of greater resources within the cloud on demand.
- Allowing customers to have their own database, to share databases or to access many databases.
- Reducing the exposure of a single point of failure.
- Benefiting from the lower costs of using cloud resources on an as-needed basis and releasing them when done.
- Reducing I/O bottlenecks and SQL Azure throttling.
