Microsoft recently announced the general availability (GA) of the Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server.
Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server is a deployment mode designed to provide more granular control and flexibility over database management functions and configuration settings than the Single Server deployment mode.
Over a year ago, the company released the preview version of Flexible Server to provide customers with maximum control, flexibility, and the ability to customize their MySQL database configuration to quickly achieve specific performance, scaling, high availability, and cost optimization goals. Now almost after a year of continuously improving the service by delivering various features, it is GA.
Microsoft designed the new deployment mode to:
- Simplify the application development experience using pre-integrated tools with GitHub, Terraform, Azure Kubernetes Services, and Web Apps
- Enable the development of highly available, resilient, and scalable applications with the option to select same-zone or zone-redundant high availability and the ability to scale-out up to 10 read replicas
- Allow users to fine-tune over 300 database parameters, choose their maintenance schedule, scale IOPS independent of provisioned storage, and specify the optimal amount of CPU and memory resources
- Allow users to optimize their costs
- Secure data with total network isolation, data at rest encryption, and encrypted connections with complete control over TLS and SSL enforcement
Users can create an Azure Database for MySQL using the Azure Portal, CLI, or ARM template and configure the Flexible Server deployment mode option. Note that the Flexible Server option only supports MySQL versions 5.7 and 8.0. Furthermore, next to the Single and Flexible Server mode, users can also deploy MySQL on Azure VMs.
The latest Stack Overflow developer survey reported MySQL as the most used database among developers. Hence, Microsoft and other public cloud providers like Google and AWS offer MySQL services on their platforms. For example, Google offers Cloud SQL, a fully-managed relational database service for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. Cloud SQL currently supports MySQL 8.0, 5.7, and 5.6 and provides up to 416 GB of RAM and 30 TB of data storage for every managed database. Similarly, MySQL on Amazon RDS also supports these versions with various instance sizes.
In a Microsoft Tech community blog post, director of product, Platform & Infrastructure at GitHub Ilya Tillis said:
As a large MySQL shop that manages hundreds of database servers in our own data centers, we certainly know what it takes to build performant and reliable data tiers. The zone redundancy and provisioning scalability of MySQL Flexible Server has helped us accelerate the expansion of our internal cloud usage at GitHub.
Azure Database of MySQL Flexible Server is currently available in more than 30 regions worldwide. Furthermore, details of the service are available on the Azure Database for MySQL landing page and pricing on the pricing page.
