Databases hosted with Azure other than virtual machines are managed by Azure and are known as managed services. Managed services means that Azure provides management services for the databases. These managed services include the hosting of the database, ensuring that the host is highly available, ensuring that the data is replicated internally for availability during disaster recovery, ensuring scalability within the constraint of a chosen SKU, monitoring the hosts and databases and generating alerts for notifications or executing actions, providing log and auditing services for troubleshooting, and taking care of performance management and security alerts.

In short, there are a lot of services that customers get out of the box when using managed services from Azure, and they do not need to perform active management on these databases. In this chapter, we will look at Azure SQL in depth and provide information on other databases such as Cosmos DB, MySQL, and Postgre.