March 20, 2019 marked the first anniversary of general availability for our managed Open Source relational database management system (RDBMS) services, including Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Database for MySQL. A great year of learning and improvements lays behind us, and we are looking forward to an exciting future!
Thank you to all our customers, who have trusted Azure to host their Open Source Software (OSS) applications with MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. We are very grateful for your support and for pushing us to build the best managed services in the cloud!
It’s amazing to the see the variety of mission critical applications that customers run on top of our services. From line of business applications over real-time event processing to internet of things applications, we see all possible patterns running across our different OSS RDBMS offerings. Check out some great success stories by reading our case studies! It’s humbling to see the trust our customers put in the platform! We love the challenges posed by this variety of use cases, and we are always hungry to learn and provide even more enhanced support.
We wouldn’t have reached this point without ongoing feedback and feature requests from our customers. There have been asks for functionality such as read replicas, greater performance, extended regional coverage, additional RDBMS engines like MariaDB, and more. In response, over the year since our services became generally available, we have delivered features and functionality to address these asks. Just check out some of the announcements we have made over the past year:
- Latest updates to Azure Database for MySQL – July 2018
- Latest updates to Azure Database for PostgreSQL – July 2018
- Latest updates to Open Source Database Services for Azure – September 2018 (Ignite)
- Announcing the general availability of Azure Database for MariaDB – December 2018
- Read Replicas for Azure Database for PostgreSQL in public preview – January 2019
- Scaling out read workloads in Azure Database for MySQL – March 2019
- Service update announcements for:
We also want to enable customers to focus on using these features when developing their applications. To that end, we are constantly enhancing our compliance certification portfolio to address a broader set of standards. This gives customers the peace of mind, knowing that our services are increasingly safe and secure. We have also introduced features such as Threat Protection (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and Intelligent Performance (PostgreSQL) to the OSS RDBMS services, so there are two fewer things to worry about!
Open Source is all about the community and the ecosystem built around the Open Source products delivered by the community. We want to bring this goodness to our platform and support it so that customers can leverage the benefits when using our managed services. For example, we have recently announced support for GraphQL with Hasura and TimescaleDB! However, we want to be more than a consumer and make significant contributions to the community. Our first major contribution was the release of the Open Source Azure Data Studio with support for PostgreSQL.
While we are proud to highlight these developments, we also understand that we are still at the outset of the journey. We have a lot of work to do and many challenges to overcome, but we are continuing to move ahead at full steam. We are very thrilled to have Citus Data joining the team, and you can expect to see a lot of focus on enabling improved performance, greater scale, and more built-in intelligence. Find more information about this acquisition by visiting the blog post, “Microsoft and Citus Data: Providing the best PostgreSQL service in the cloud.”
Next steps
In the interim, be sure to take advantage of the following, helpful resources.
- Azure Database for PostgreSQL
- Performance best practices for using Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Connection Pooling
- Performance troubleshooting using new Azure Database for PostgreSQL features
- Performance updates and tuning best practices for using Azure Database for PostgreSQL
- Best practices for alerting on metrics with Azure Database for PostgreSQL monitoring
- Securely monitoring your Azure Database for PostgreSQL Query Store
- Azure Database for MySQL
- Azure Database for MariaDB
We look forward to continued feedback and feature requests from our customers. More than ever, we are committed to ensuring that our OSS RDBMS services are top-notch leaders in the cloud! Stay tuned, as we have a lot more in the pipeline!