Editor’s Note: This post was updated on May 29, 2012 to reflect availability of SQL Azure in the “West US” Region.

People’s ears usually perk-up when they hear Windows Azure uses more server compute capacity than was used on the planet in 1999.  We are excited and humbled by the number of new customers signing up for Windows Azure each week and the growth from existing customers who continue to expand their usage.  Given the needs of both new and existing customers, we continue to add capacity to existing datacenters and expand our global footprint to new locations across the globe. 

To anticipate the capacity needs of existing customers, we closely monitor our datacenters capacity trends. To ensure customers can grow their usage in datacenters in which they are already deployed, datacenters that hit certain thresholds are removed as options for new customers.  Today, we are removing compute and storage services as options for new customers in the South Central US region. Existing customers already deployed into South Central are not impacted. SQL Azure, Service Bus, Caching, and Access Control remain available in South Central to new customers. 

As we announced in a recent blog post, two new US datacenter options (“West US” and “East US”) are available to Windows Azure customers.  Today we are announcing the availability of SQL Azure in the “East US” and “West US” Regions to complement existing compute and storage services.

We appreciate the incredible interest our customers are showing in Windows Azure, and will communicate future news around our growing footprint of global datacenters as new options come online.  As always, the best way to try Windows Azure is with the free 90-day trial.

Steven Martin, General Manager, Windows Azure Business Planning