Planning your journey to SQL Server on Azure: Introduction to series

When you want to move to SQL Server on Microsoft Azure from on-premises or if you starting your cloud journey and want to explore SQL server offerings on Microsoft Azure, you have multiple options —

1. SQL Server on virtual machine
2. Microsoft SQL Server Managed Instance
3. Azure SQL Database

Each option comes with pros and cons. Here I will be focusing on Microsoft SQL Server Managed Instance as this might be a natural and easier choice without impacting your existing investments in SQL server on-premises.

This article is an introduction to various topics that are covered or will be covered. It is not my intention to touch any topics around development or implementation. Rather, the topics will be focused on infrastructure part.

In this series, I am planning to cover the following topics. You can simply click on the topic which will take you to more details. Please drop a comment if you wish to include additional topics in this series.

• Introduction, capabilities and best practices for provisioning
• Licensing — BYOL vs PAYG
• Capacity planning and cost optimization
• Security and data privacy
• Authentication and authorization
• Working with managed identities — Connect to SQL server, Execute SQL agent jobs
• Working with service accounts
• Migration — Data migration, SQL agent jobs, SSIS packages

Thank you for reading!