October 29, 2026 at 5:55 pm
We're currently in Azure, however as we had a very tight migration timeline when we moved, we've been using SQL Server on Azure VMs for the last several years. There's a push in the organization to go "cloud native," and on the database side, well, I see some potential headaches.
My question can be boiled down to, based on the situation below, would Managed Instance be a reasonable move rather than going to Azure Database?
What we have is several applications that talk to multiple databases currently on the same SQL Server instance on a VM. Now, we don't have anything like "trustworthy" turned on, instead the same login exists in multiple databases on this instance. Now as I understand it, if we went to Azure Database, getting this functionality to work would be a fair bit of code change on the application side, as (I believe) currently the inter-database stuff is in various stored procedures, which would not work in Azure Database. So migrating these DBs into Managed Instance would avoid having to move the stored procedure code into the application code.
The other part of the situation is more a "the future is murky and who knows what may come" sort of thing. My concern is that, at some point in the future, the higher-ups may send down a directive that "we're moving to AWS / Google Cloud / Oracle Cloud and you have 30 days to make it happen." Well, if we've moved all the databases into Azure Database, the only way out is to extract the data, schemas, stored procedures, etc, and recreate it all in a new database at the new host. If, however, we migrate to Managed Instance and set it to "SQL Server 2025" and use a "User defined Key" for TDE in the Managed Instance, we CAN backup our databases to Azure Blob storage, then restore them to an on-premise SQL Server 2025 instance (I know this, for I have tested it today. Yes, I was surprised it worked, too)
While Azure Database might be the less expensive option, if we take advantage of serverless and auto-shutdown, a fair number of our applications are 24x7 or close to it. Our test environment, well, we'd probably set the Managed Instance(s) there to auto-shutdown in the evening, and auto-start in the mornings on the weekdays to keep costs down some.
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