Yeah, Azure.

How we program, what we program and where we program is changing. All the time. This excellent article lays out a bunch of the trends that are going on within software these days. And one of the single biggest parts of this trend is the fact that more and more things are online. In the cloud, if you insist. Clearly, despite unusual (and I would argue, unreasoning) resistance from my fellow DBAs, Azure is absolutely becoming “a thing.”

If you’re like me, as you sit around carefully weaving your buggy whips, you’re also keeping an eye on the road, just in case you start to see more automobiles than horses. Maybe I’m located in a bad spot, but it’s starting to look like a sixteen lane mega-highway outside my door with nary a horse in sight. In short, it’s time to make the leap and start learning the technology around the cloud.

Now, since I’m a Microsoft user, and have been for a very long time, I’m tending to follow along behind their cloud offering. There are positives and negatives around this, but, by and large, I’m seeing the positives far outweighing the negatives. If you want to get started and you already have an MSDN subscription, just link it to an Azure account. It costs nothing, and since you don’t have to supply a credit card and will have a fixed limit on how many resources you can use, it never will cost anything. Go here to make that happen.

The company I work for, Red Gate Software, is pretty serious about supporting the cloud. We have stuff that works with Azure and Amazon and it’s just going to keep expanding because, they’re seeing fewer horses too. For example, we’re actively building development tools to support the kind of high speed, constant, repeatable deployments that are going to be needed by the development paradigms laid out in the article above. And, we’re incorporating those with cloud offerings, today. Here’s a blog post on how to use Deployment Manager to go to Windows Azure SQL Databases. It’s so easy. Now you can implement WASD as part of your development and deployment processes. Because our tool is also managing your app deployments, we’re talking direct integration between application and database. And, best of all, you can couple it in a hybrid fashion, mixing in cloud-based architecture with your local architecture, all through our deployment tools.

If you want to learn more about Azure, Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Virtual Machines running SQL Server and Windows Azure SQL Database, then sign up for my all-day, pre-conference seminar at the 2013 PASS Summit.