There is some marketing-speak suggesting that it may be possible ..:
http://gigaom.com/2012/06/05/new-windows-azure-goes-all-ssd-to-one-up-amazon-in-the-cloud/
.. but I couldn't find any way to actually do it using control panel.
More specifically, I'd like to improve random read/write performance.
Random read/write benchmark (4K and 4K/QD32 rows) are shown on the screenshot below:
(update #1)
From: https://aws.amazon.com/windows/
There's such instance as:
m3.xlarge
.. 15GiB RAM
.. 2 x 40 SSD
.. $0.702 per Hour
So to make my question more specific: is there any equivalent for such instance on Azure?
(update #2)
I ended up using ..:
A7
.. 56 GB RAM
.. $1.60 per Hour
.. and creating RamDisk using "ImDisk Toolkit": http://reboot.pro/files/file/284-imdisk-toolkit/
This got me random read/write performance close to what I wanted:
But this was way too much effort and I had to accept "NO" as an answer.