Microsoft has announced multiple updates to its Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform today. These updates are meant to help companies migrate database workloads to its data centers and making it easier to run them in Azure.
SQL Server customers can now try the preview for SQL Database Managed Instance, Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server, and Azure Database Migration Service preview for Managed Instance. Additionally, Microsoft has also announced the preview for Apache Tomcat® support in Azure App Service and the general availability of Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL in the coming weeks, making it easier to bring open source powered applications to Azure.
Microsoft SQL Database Managed Instance
Azure SQL Database Managed Instance allows seamless movement of any SQL Server application to Azure without application changes. Managed Instance offers full engine compatibility with existing SQL Server deployments including capabilities like SQLAgent, DBMail, and Change Data Capture, to name a few.
Microsoft Azure Database Migration Service
The Azure Database Migration Service is designed as an end-to-end solution to help customers moving databases from on-premises SQL Server instances to SQL Database Managed Instances.
Microsoft Azure Hybrid Benefit program
With the Azure Hybrid Benefit program customers can now move their on-premises SQL Server licenses with active Software Assurance to Managed Instance and soon the SQL Server Integration Services licenses to Azure Data Factory with upto 30% discounted pricing.
Apache Tomcat® support in Microsoft Azure App Service
Microsoft also announced a preview of built-in support for Apache Tomcat and OpenJDK 8 from Azure App Service. This will help Java developers easily deploy web applications and APIs to Azure’s market leading PaaS. Once deployed, customers can then extend it with the Azure SDK for Java to work with various Azure services such as Storage, Azure Database for MySQL, and Azure Database for PostgreSQL.
General availability of Azure database services for MySQL and PostgreSQL
Azure Database Services for MySQL and PostgreSQL provide customers with fully managed homes for their open source databases in Microsoft’s cloud. These reduce a company’s time spent in managing things like database scaling and patching.
SQL Information Protection Preview
SQL Information Protection lets organizations discover, classify, label and protect potentially sensitive data that’s stored in a database management system, either in Microsoft’s cloud or in an organization’s datacenters. This service can be used with the Azure SQL Database service or with SQL Server on premises.
More information about these updates is available on the Microsoft Azure blog.