Recently Microsoft announced the general availability as per the end of July of Azure Arc-enabled SQL, which extends the Azure SQL instances to be hosted on an edge data center or in a multi-cloud environment. An Azure Arc enabled SQL Managed Instance has near 100% compatibility with the latest SQL Server database engine. In addition, it allows existing SQL Server customers to lift and shift their applications to Azure Arc data services.
Earlier, Arc-Enabled Azure SQL was released to public preview as Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance in September last year. SQL Managed Instance's general purpose is a tier of Microsoft's relational database service, based on SQL Server, that operates like an on-premises SQL Server instance. Now the company plans to GA the general-purpose tier of Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance at the end of the month.
Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president, Azure Data, explained in an Azure blog post about Azure Arc-enabled SQL the benefits :
Businesses will be able to deploy Azure SQL databases on any infrastructure and any Kubernetes to:
- Stay current with automated updates and deploy evergreen features and security updates to on-prem databases with no end-of-support.
- Automate routine database administrator (DBA) tasks at scale with built-in management capabilities, including high availability, backup, and restore.
- Optimize data workload performance by bringing cloud elasticity on-premises for existing infrastructure, using only the resources needed to scale up or down without application downtime dynamically.
- Access Azure industry-leading security and governance capabilities for your on-premises data workloads to protect your data.
Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/azure-arc/overview?view=sql-server-ver15
Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance is a part of the broader Azure Arc-enabled data services, including Azure Arc enabled Azure PostgreSQL Hyperscale - the hyper-scale form factor of the Postgres database engine. Furthermore, the overall Azure Arc-enabled services portfolio also includes App Services, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Functions, Event Grid, and API Management – currently in public preview.
More details of Azure Arc and its enabled services are available on the documentation landing page, and guidance for setting up an Azure Arc Enabled SQL Managed Instance in Azure Kubernetes Cluster, for instance, on GitHub.
Lastly, Microsoft will continuously roll out new product features and capabilities, allowing customers to opt-in to preview additional Azure Arc-enabled services, such as PostgreSQL, and easily integrate as they generally become available.