Even before I moved to working only with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, a common question from clients and prospects about it, was how scalable the cloud version is and what performance was going to be like. This is a fairly difficult question to answer as there are a lot of things which can impact the performance of SaaS products, including your general Internet connectivity speed.
However, Stefano Demiliani, a Microsoft MVP, published an article in November called Dynamics 365 Business Central: is my on-premises customer ready for SaaS? in which he takes a look at both the platform and code scalability of Business Central.
The article is definitely worth a read as he delves into quite a few numbers around users, transactions, apps, web service calls and much more.
Dynamics 365 Business Central is a reliable platform designed for scale.
The reliability of the platform is guaranteed by Microsoft. Just to give some numbers, Dynamics 365 Business Central production environments in the last 3 months had an uptime of 99.98% and this means 9 minutes of downtime per month at maximum.
The platform had 14 Billions of sessions created in the last 30 days, 1.9 Billions of API calls in the last 7 days and an average of 2.5K apps installed every day. These are big numbers and a clear sign that the infrastructure is reliable and mature.
The Dynamics 365 Business Central infrastructure now has load balancing and an advanced auto-scaling feature. Basically speaking, UI sessions and web service sessions connect to a compute tier and the compute tier is responsible to handle the database access:
A key point Stefano notes is that Business Central 2023 Release Wave 2 has new operational limits based on per user rather than per environment:
Concurrency limit for scheduled tasks
Old: 3 concurrently running tasks per environment
New: 5 concurrently running tasks per user (expected: early Q4CY23)
Speed limit for web service requests
Old limit: 600 web service requests per environment per minute
New limit: 6,000 web service requests per user in the previous 5-minute sliding window (expected: mid-Q4CY23)
Concurrency limit for web service requests
Old: 100 concurrently handled (5 processed, 95 queued) web service requests per environment
New: 100 concurrently handled (5 processed, 95 queued) web service requests per user (expected: late Q4CY23)
The full article from Stefano, where he takes a look at how Microsoft scale the platform based on demand, is available here.