In this article, we will take a look at how to create a serverless Azure SQL database.

Introduction to Serverless Computing Model

Traditionally on-premise or private data-center infrastructure was used to host the IT eco-system. With the advent of the cloud, the IT ecosystem composed of applications, data repositories and services started moving to the cloud. One of the core benefits of cloud that drives migration from on-premise to cloud is the financial incentive, which is achieved due to a heavy reduction in capital and operational expenditure on hardware and infrastructure. Generally, those moving from on-premise to cloud consider the Infrastructure As a Service (IaaS) option i.e. in simplified words, hosting systems on a Virtual Machine (VM). In the context of the Azure cloud and SQL Server as the database server, hosting it on a VM. With this model, while one does not have to permanently own or maintain hardware, but still there is a significant degree of software, infrastructure capacity and OS management involved.

The next logical step from here is to move to Azure SQL Database instances or Managed SQL Database or Elastic Pooled database instance on Azure. With this model, the onus of managing the OS and the software itself gets eliminated, but still one needs to know the capacity one needs to meet the requirements of their workloads. To deal with this situation, a serverless model comes in which can auto-scale based on the threshold criteria to meet the elastic scaling needs of the workloads. SQL Server Database on Azure supports the serverless model and in this article, we would learn how to create a serverless Azure database.

Serverless Azure SQL Database Setup

A pre-requisite to follow this exercise is to have an Azure Account with required privileges on Azure SQL Server Database as well as Azure SQL Server service. As the first step, log on to the Azure portal and navigate to All Services. Click on the Azure SQL Database service from the Databases section as shown below.

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