An introduction to the Azure data platform

- [Instructor] Microsoft's Azure data platform provides convenient and powerful options for modernizing your database infrastructure. The world of relational databases has changed dramatically over the past decade or so. It wasn't very long ago that database administrators would need to completely manage all of their resources on-premises in a company-owned and operated data center. From purchasing and installing components, troubleshooting and fixing hardware failures, maintaining operating systems, service updates, and patches; licensing software, and providing network authentication, security, and disaster recovery support. That's a lot of responsibility that often requires a team of dedicated specialist staff and contractors in order to keep the entire system up and running. Enter the cloud. With the rise of cloud services, this model of managing everything entirely on-site has started to fall by the wayside. Now, specific areas of responsibility can be offloaded to a service provider that can oftentimes do a better job of maintaining a wide variety of these complex interrelated systems. And do so at lower costs when compared to doing everything in-house. This frees up the most valuable resource within any organization, you. Since you're watching this course, I can assume that you're interested in taking Microsoft's DP-300 certification exam. Before you embark on this endeavor, you should have some relational database experience under your belt. Perhaps you've worked with SQL Server or PostgreSQL databases on your own computer or a company's workstation. When moving to a cloud-hosted database solution, many of your existing skills will transfer right over. There will, however, be some amount of additional knowledge that you'll need to acquire. The DP-300 exam is directly aimed at people that have some relational database experience. And are looking to take their current base of knowledge and apply it to this new paradigm of cloud-native and hybrid cloud data platforms. Now, I've heard it said that the cloud is nothing more than someone else's computer. At a high-level, that's exactly right. There's nothing magical about cloud services. However, by servicing a number of different clients from the same consolidated data centers, cloud providers such as Microsoft can take advantage of economies of scale, redundancies, and other efficiencies that simply aren't available to most businesses when they're all independently operating their own servers. So Microsoft Azure is a cloud services provider. And it offers a wide variety of services and resources that can be selected and assembled to meet the needs of modern app development and business requirements. From storage, to networking, to authentication and security services. There's a lot of options to choose from in Azure. For the DP-300 exam, though, we're just going to be focusing on the data platform resources. And specifically, working with relational databases in the cloud. When you move your database system to the cloud, you're able to shift responsibility for management of these resources to your cloud service provider. Either in part or entirely. Different products are available, depending on how hands-on you want to be with your cloud-hosted systems. In the traditional on-premises configuration, you're responsible for maintaining every aspect of your database server, software, and hardware. If you choose an IaaS or an infrastructure as a service product, then you can relinquish hardware-related maintenance tasks to the cloud provider. You won't need to worry about network configuration or faulty hardware. With an IaaS solution, you'll maintain full access and control over your operating system and database software. And you'll still be responsible for applying security patches and making database backups. To relinquish even more responsibility to your cloud provider, choose a PaaS or a platform as a service product. Under this service level, your cloud provider is fully in charge of maintaining the hardware, operating system, and database software. You'll be a little bit more limited in the types of custom configurations that you can apply to the service capabilities. But a PaaS solution allows you to focus all of your attention on building your databases and working with your data without having to be concerned with hardware failures, network configuration, and routine-server maintenance. In addition, PaaS solutions can automatically take advantage of high availability configurations, geo-replication, and other enterprise-level features that would be complicated and expensive to set up on your own. All you need to do is tick the boxes for the features that you want enabled. And Microsoft will take care of all of the configuration that's required. Within the Azure ecosystem, there are versions of SQL Server that fall into either an IaaS or a PaaS solution where Microsoft will maintain either the infrastructure or the entire platform. We'll discuss these options in more detail throughout this course. Within the platform as a service model, Microsoft also supports some additional open-source databases, including MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL. The DP-300 exam may touch on these additional offerings as well. So it'll be important to be aware of their availability and to see how to deploy them. With all of these data platform options, it can be a daunting task to decide which provide the best components for you and your organization. The decision will come down to an analysis of capabilities, performance requirements, and pricing. Let's take a closer look at each of the database offerings that can be deployed on Microsoft Azure.