SQL on Azure

Editor's Notes

• #13: When you look at relational data services in the cloud, there are two main options to consider: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).   Microsoft’s IaaS offerings, such as Azure Virtual Machines, deliver infrastructure in the cloud. With IaaS, virtual machines are paid for by the hour, and storage is paid for by GB per month. With this model, you can host your SQL Server database in an Azure VM, while still taking advantage of full SQL Server functionality, the ability to fully customize each VM, plus the elimination of hardware costs…AND the need to justify purchasing a piece of hardware every time you want to spin up something new.   Azure virtual machines give you full control and flexibility over your Mission Critical databases – while removing the hardware costs and maintenance. Because they work just like a virtualized server on-premises, Azure virtual machines make for easy cloud migration, and the ability to quickly spin up development and test environments that mirror your production environments. Azure virtual machines and Azure storage also give you the option to use the cloud to increase business continuity for your on-premises applications, by putting a replica in the cloud to failover to in the event of an outage, or providing convenient and inexpensive storage for backups – that can quickly and easily be restored to an Azure virtual machines.   PaaS offers platform technologies, such as those delivered on Azure SQL Database, SQL Datawarehouse and HD Insight for building and running applications in the cloud. When you combine your on premises data running in SQL Server 2016, you get net new scenarios like stretching to the cloud and hybrid advanced analytics – harnessing the power of hybrid cloud to do something that couldn’t be done before.
• #14: Migrating existing on-prem SQL Server applications to Azure Virtual Machines is easier than ever with the migration wizard built right into SQL Server Management Studio that will help you size the appropriate VM and get your on-premise SQL Server to the cloud. You also have more and larger VM sizes becoming available on Azure making it easier than ever to run your Mission Critical applications there. The newest class of Azure VMs takes advantage of premium storage, offering more flexibility to run larger workloads than ever before. There are free tools to help you convert from non-virtualized state or if you are virtualized on a different solution to convert to Hyper-V. Once in Hyper-V VHD, you can choose to migrate the entire VHD or just the database to the Azure VM.
• #15: Develop and Test is another great scenarios where you have an opportunity to not only reduce costs, but also speed time to market. A SQL Server instance in an Azure Virtual Machine can be provisioned in minutes versus in many cases days or weeks on premises depending on resource availability and hardware procurement policy. With Visual Studio Online, you can now have a consistent application lifecycle management policy from on-premises to Azure as well as secure, redundant source code.
• #16: SQL Server 2016 enables new hybrid cloud solutions that can help you reduce CAPEX and OPEX while improving Mission Critical scenarios such as DR. You can also enable a disaster recovery scenario with lower RTO (recovery time objective) and better RPO (recovery point objective) in the cloud. In this scenario you can add asynchronous replicas to Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines and do them simply with an Add Replica wizard that makes it a point and click experience directly in SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio). As soon as a transaction is committed on-premises it is sent asynchronously to the Microsoft Azure replica. We still recommend you keep your synchronous replica on-premises, but by having the additional replicas in Microsoft Azure again you gain improved DR and can reduce your CAPEX and OPEX costs of physically maintiaing additional hardware in additional data centers. Also the replicas in Microsoft Azure can be efficiently utilized to take care of read functionality like BI reporting or also utilized for doing backups, speeding up the backup to Microsoft Azure process as the secondary is in Microsoft Azure already. We’ve now added load balancing of readable secondaries to Always On. This is great if you are going to put readable secondaries in Azure or in another data center. It allows you to offload a lot of your BI reporting, even your backups, to these secondaries, and if they are load balanced, it improves your overall performance and scalability significantly. Since we depend on Windows Server clustering, there are benefits from the infrastructure side too. Windows Server 2016 removes the need to domain join your AlwaysOn node. This is especially great for those of you who have wanted to always use Azure in a hybrid way but been restricted by governance policies that don’t allow for domain joining.
• #17: Lets take a look at a simple and inexpensive boost for your business continuity, which is the ability to backup your on-premises database to Microsoft Azure and gain the benefits of geo-redundancy in the cloud for your Mission Critical on-premises databases. You can enable policy based backup directly to Microsoft Azure Storage and all you need is the URL and storage key. The backup is policy based at an instance level, meaning all of your databases within the instance follow the policy set and the backup can be implemented both manually or automated. In addition you gain the benefits of Microsoft Azure storage which offers Geo Replication that replicates the backups stored in multiple datacenters so you have even better DR for your backups. Also in the case of an on-premises failure you can restore the backups in Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines. For Backup to URL we now support: Backing up to Block Blobs, which support greater than 1TB-sized backups and support striping. With backing up to block blobs you can stripe your backups across many blobs to increase size of backups and throughput.   For Managed backup we now support: Backing up system databases and Configurable schedules to meet your maintenance needs.   For Databases which live directly in Azure we now support File-Snapshot Backup: File-Snapshot Backup allows people to perform super-fast backup and restore. It also supports full point in time restore. For more info on file-snapshot see our blog and MSDN page
• #18: Now let’s talk about some of these innovative hybrid scenarios that can compliment your on-premises SQL Server Mission Critical investments. Stretch database, is one of these unique hybrid scenarios that only Microsoft provides and can be extremely valuable in your data strategy. We know your OLTP databases are growing rapidly and you need to think about how to cost effectively manage your data. More importantly, you need to think about what you’re doing with historical data and whether you want it to go offline onto tape. When it goes to tape, it’s not queryable anymore. What if you wanted the historical data at your fingertips but didn’t want to have it reside on premium storage with your hot data because it’s too costly. We can solve that problem with this stretch database hybrid scenario. Without modifying your app, you can stretch your database to Azure. You don’t even have to do any of the heavy lifting to make this work. You just have to set the policy you want to apply on the historical data and run the query as you normally would. SQL Server determines if the table has been stretched and retrieves the data from Azure. The other thing to note is that this technology does not impact the performance of writes on the same table being stretched as part of the engineering design point for this solution. A question you might ask is I am stretching historical customer data which has sensitive data, what about data security. The best part is that stretch database works with our new Always Encrypted technology that protects the columns you desire at rest and in motion, even in the memory buffer pool, so sensitive customer information is secure. Stretch database offers a great value prop in terms of saving you money and providing easy access to historical customer data so you can make improve customer experiences without requiring application modifications.  
• #19: Only Microsoft can deliver customers a consistent experience from on-premises to cloud – that’s our goal. We’re not saying that we want to take everybody that cloud is the only option and you have to move there. Rather we want ensure we deliver a great experience from on-premises to hybrid cloud to cloud only if you choose. The point is you decide what is best for a particular application or workloads and you will be able to deliver it without having to rewrite you application, or learn new development tools or new development language or new management tools. Only Microsoft can offer this consistent experience across identity, virtualization, management, and dev-ops. We’ve got all the tools that you love and we can ensure that we deliver a great experience no matter where you choose to deploy. This concludes my presentation.<pause…….>