SQL Azure added federations in Dec 2011, which is our implementation of the sharding application pattern

This work is in progress

This is on roadmap but ETA isn’t until post Fall 2012. More votes for this feature might help move it up though timing depends on some other factors as well. Mark Berman on the planning team suggested a workaround that involved removing the instance from the front-end load-balancer i.e. so that it doesn’t respond to any requests? RDFE has an API that allows you to stop sending requests to an instance. The idea being that you can have n number of instances in hot standby waiting. This is of course a workaround, but it might address some of the short term need while we wait on the feature.