Following last month's announcement of zone-redundant database support, Azure SQL Database is further expanding the power of databases and elastic pools by including read scale-out support in the Premium and Business Critical service tiers.
This capability redirects the read-only client connections to one of the automatically provisioned HA replicas and effectively doubles the compute capacity of the database or elastic pool at no additional charge. This is ideal for load balancing of complex analytical workloads without affecting the primary OLTP workload.
To learn more, see the read scale-out documentation.