At Microsoft, our approach is to listen to customers and bring solutions and tools that can help solve their problems. It is at the heart of everything we do. It is the same listening process that got us to PostgreSQL, and a couple of years back we embarked on the journey to bring PostgreSQL as a fully managed database service on Azure. We reached a key milestone towards that journey when we recently announced the general availability of Azure Database for PostgreSQL.
Attending community and customer events is always special for me – it’s an opportunity to engage with and learn from some of the leading minds in the industry. PostgresConf US 2018 is even more special given how much support we have received from the Postgres community and I look forward to meeting community leaders, customers, and partners at the event. I’ll also be joined by a few of my colleagues, and while you can find us at the Microsoft booth, you can also attend product deep dive session by Sunil Kamath and a GDPR session by Mark Bolz.
During my keynote at the conference, I’ll share some of our learnings leading to the general availability of Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Reflecting back to when we started, PostgreSQL was very new to us, so first of all we engaged deeply with the community to understand Postgres and the surrounding ecosystem. We also engaged very closely with our customers through the preview, helping unblock issues and prioritizing what was important to them. If I distill what we learnt during the preview period, there are four key areas to highlight.
First, customers care about fundamentals, on-premises and in the cloud, and customers across database engines have similar needs. Resiliency, fault tolerance, availability, elastic performance, and scale matter a lot. So, while customers get automatic updates and patching, and other benefits in using a fully managed database service, we ensured that the fundamentals are also built into the platform. For example, when customers choose Azure Database for PostgreSQL, it comes with built-in high availability at no extra cost. This is also backed by industry leading SLA of 99.99%.
Second, in many conversations that we have had with customers and CIOs, a key, if not the most important, topic that consistently comes up is security and compliance. Here too, similar to with fundamentals, we ensure built-in security to ensure our customers are covered. For example, data at rest and data in motion is encrypted by default using TLS1.2 standards in Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Going into general availability, we also ensured global and local certifications, such as ISO, SOC, PCI, HIPAA, and GDPR.
Third, we understand that developers are making technology choices based on their app requirements and may choose different database engines based on the app stack. At the same time, they want to use all their data in a meaningful way. That’s why we are ensuring Azure Database for PostgreSQL is integrated with other Azure products, such as Containers, App Service and Power BI, to enable customers to create end to end solutions. We’ll continue to make it easier for customers to use PostgreSQL with other Microsoft products and tools.
Lastly, we learnt that customers are making a key choice not just about the database but also about the cloud platform where it’s hosted. Customers are looking for cloud vendors that can partner with them in their digital transformation journey. At Microsoft Azure, we have made investments in building a cloud platform that meets customers where they are with support for the stack of their choice, hybrid solutions and a rich set of intelligent solutions, such as Azure Databricks, Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Cognitive APIs. With more public cloud regions than any other cloud vendor and industry leading security and compliance offering, customers worldwide can choose Azure as their trusted partner.
I’m looking forward to sharing more during the keynote and in person when I get to meet some of you at the conference this week.
See you at PostgresConf US 2018!
- Microsoft Keynote: April 19, 2018 at 3:40 PM Eastern Time (Rohan Kumar)
- Session on Azure Database for PostgreSQL deep dive: April 20, 2018 at 12:50 PM Eastern Time (Sunil Kamath)
- Session on General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): April 18, 2018 at 4:30 PM Eastern Time (Mark Bolz)
Resources
If you’d like to try out our Azure Database for PostgreSQL, you can get started or sign up for a free Azure account.
Be sure to let us know what you think through User Voice PostgreSQL!