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If only I could upload my brain to the cloud. BaaS anyone?
What is Database as a Service (DaaS)?
Azure SQL Database is Microsoft's version of DaaS.
DaaS is a cloud service in which the service provider manages the operating system and database software. In addition to that, they may also relieve your IT staff of certain administration tasks such as backups, high availaiblity/DR, patching etc…
Pricing.
The users of such a service will most likely pay according to their usage. Most of the time, this model is seen as superior to paying a license or locking into some type of contract.
The purpose of cloud services is to reduce overall costs, however one must be mindful and do some price comparison. Depending on your service tier and hourly usage it may or may not be a cost savings.
Advantages:
No longer have to worry about maintaining hardware, VMs, OS patching or Database Software.
The ability to scale environments with the click of a button. Cloud services such as Azure make it easy to scale your environment (up or down) very easily. Basically on demand scaling.
Azure SQL also receives new features before the traditional version of SQL Server does. Microsfost often refers to this as the “Cloud First Release Model”.
How do I manage/provision Azure SQL Databases?
You will have a few options. Login to portal.azure.com and either create an account or login with an existing account.
Under the billing option you can choose what type of tiered service you need. We will go into detail in future posts. There is even a free trial so you can use it as a "lab" for yourself.
Personally, I think the interface is pretty nice, and I'm looking forward to delving into it a bit more.
PowerShell:
Azure is also easily administered with powershell. In fact, the sheer amount of Cmdlets available make it seem that they're really pushing for admins to use that over anything else. And why not? There's so much that one can automate with PowerShell.
This will be an ongoing series and we'll go into much more detail in future posts. Stay tuned!