3.4. Open Source Databases on Azure

💡 First Principle: Not every workload belongs on SQL Server—sometimes your application was built on PostgreSQL, MySQL, or MariaDB, and rewriting for SQL Server would cost more than the migration savings. Azure offers fully managed PaaS versions of these popular open-source engines, giving you cloud benefits (automatic backups, scaling, high availability) without abandoning your existing database platform or rewriting application code.

What breaks without managed services? Running PostgreSQL on a VM means you're responsible for patching the OS, updating PostgreSQL versions, configuring replication for high availability, managing backups, and handling storage expansion. That's a full-time job—or more realistically, work that doesn't get done until something breaks.

Consider a startup with a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) application. They don't want to rewrite their database layer for SQL Server, but they also don't want to manage infrastructure. Azure Database for MySQL gives them the best of both worlds.