Azure SQL Managed Instance
Migrating SQL Server workloads to Azure can provide more benefits than simply offloading hardware management. Organizations can also take advantage of PaaS benefits that remove the overhead of managing a virtual machine, such as the OS and the SQL Server instance from users. However, applications that require instance-scoped features will still need to be able to interact with the SQL Server instance. This leaves database architects with two options: (1) rearchitect the solution to use cloud native technologies in place of instance-scoped features, or (2) migrate to a technology that supports these features. Prior to a few years back, this meant that organizations wishing to move to Azure needed to commit a lot of time to rebuilding the solution or move to SQL Server on a VM and manage the virtual machine and SQL Server–level maintenance such as upgrades. It is for these reasons that Microsoft introduced Azure SQL Managed Instance.
Azure SQL Managed Instance, or Azure SQL MI for short, is a PaaS database offering on Azure. It abstracts the OS but includes a SQL Server instance so that users can continue using their existing SQL Server processes without having to manage hardware or virtual machines. This makes it the ideal solution for customers looking to migrate many databases to Azure with as little effort as possible. Azure SQL MI also includes many system databases such as model, msdb, and tempdb. It can be used to host a distribution database for transactional replication, SSRS databases, and SSIS data catalog databases.
FIGURE 2.8 Create a SQL virtual machine: Settings tab.
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