This time, at long last, I may be right.

Annually for the last four years, I’ve had a sit-down with my bosses to talk about what’s happening in technology, where I think the growth will be, what’s going to shrink, and so on. Every year for the last four years, I've predicted strong growth for Azure. Each year I've argued, in my own subtle way, that Microsoft’s “bet the entire farm and sell the children as indentured servants” approach to Azure, which they summarized as “All in”, is going to finally pay off in a big way. Every year up to this one, I’ve been wrong.

Microsoft has been growing the service offering. There’s been more and better functionality coming out almost weekly. Yet, when I gave presentations, I’d be talking to five people, lonely in a giant open room that could have been packed if only I had talked about query tuning. The articles and blog posts I wrote on Azure never got as much attention as the ones on execution plans or backups or monitoring. Yeah, I know, you’re going to tell me that backups are universal, so it’s naturally going to draw a bigger audience, but I expected Azure to take off and become, well, not as universal as backups, but, you know, larger…

This year, when asked about it by my bosses, I regaled them with the functionality of v12 Azure SQL Database, which already has Query Store in production, where you can use Extended Events for monitoring, where they have started to put machine learning capabilities to work with Query Performance Insight. I stood up and waved my arms, shouting about how Azure SQL Data Warehouse was going to revolutionize the industry with affordable parallel data processing technology. Despite barely scratching the surface in terms of the knowledge needed to make it all work, I waxed poetic about the amazing functionality that was going to come from the democratization of machine learning with the Azure Machine Learning studio.

And then…last week I was presenting at SQL Saturday Chicago, with a session called “Azure SQL Database for the Earthed DBA” and I filled the room. It was standing room only. I counted 65 people. They were engaged. They asked questions. I wasn’t lonely any more. Then it hit me… this is the year. Azure really is starting to take off. People are finally recognizing that this isn’t a replacement for their existing servers, that it isn’t going to put them out of a job, that they really do need to learn this cloud stuff. Azure is just another tool, and an important one, in the tool box. Azure is taking off, this year.

This time, I was right.