Azure SQL history

Software and services for relational databases have been a large part of the Microsoft product offering over the years. Before you learn about Azure SQL and where it's going, let's briefly consider where it started.

Launch of Windows Azure

At the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in 2008, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect at the time, Ray Ozzie, announced the new cloud computing operating system: Windows Azure. One of the five key components of the Azure Services Platform launch was Microsoft SQL Services.

From the beginning, SQL has been a large part of Azure. SQL Azure was created to provide a cloud-hosted version of SQL Server. Windows Azure was later renamed to Microsoft Azure, SQL Azure was renamed to Azure SQL, and both have since dramatically expanded services.

Evolution of database services on Azure

Let's look at an early explanation of Azure SQL from 2010:

Azure SQL is family of a cloud database product offerings that Microsoft provides as part of the Azure cloud computing platform. Unlike other editions of SQL Server, you don't need to provision hardware, install, or patch your databases and servers. Microsoft maintains the platform for you, including all the physical infrastructure redundancy like network, power, and storage. You also don't need to architect a database installation for scalability, high availability, or disaster recovery. These features are provided automatically by the service and can be enabled easily via the Azure portal. Applications that talk to databases in Azure SQL products communicate securely over the Internet, or with Azure Private Links between your virtual network and the Microsoft backbone network.

This explanation remains valid, but the capabilities around security, performance, availability, and scale have been enhanced greatly. Azure SQL has evolved over the years and now includes a spectrum of products from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to Platform-as-a-Service (Paas), including the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering of SQL database in Microsoft Fabric. There are now multiple products with different deployment options that have the flexibility to scale to your needs. This module focuses on the PaaS and IaaS offerings of Azure SQL.

There's been many millions of Azure SQL deployments since then. The architecture for Azure SQL products have also evolved to meet the growing demands of applications. For example, the architecture introduced in 2014 set the stage for new possibilities like elastic pools, vCore choices, business-critical deployments, hyperscale, and serverless architectures.

Since 2008, SQL Server and Azure SQL products have all evolved to become more available, scalable, and performant to meet the demands of any application. The database services offered by Azure expanded beyond SQL Server. They now include databases like Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Database for MariaDB.