Cloud is a buzzword that has been around for a long time, and it can in fact have many different meanings. Generally, it is considered as a process where remote computers are used to provide services possibly over the Internet, rather than using local computer servers or personal computers. A cloud can be public when computing resources are provided and hosted by a third party over the Internet and shared by all the paying subscribers, or private when computers and servers are hosted and owned by a company or business. A cloud can be Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), or even Hardware as a Service (HaaS). Microsoft's strategy seems to be pushing towards a cloud infrastructure, and SQL Server 2014 has some features that make hosting your data and/or infrastructure in the cloud easy to work with, set up, and manage. In this chapter, you will explore the options that are available when working with SQL Server in the cloud—Microsoft Cloud in particular. We will also look at setting up and configuring Microsoft Azure Storage to house your SQL Server data files and creating your own Microsoft Azure SQL Server virtual machines. You can find out more information about this at http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/sql-database/.

In this chapter, you will learn about creating databases in Microsoft's cloud solution. This is called Microsoft Azure SQL Database, previously known as SQL Azure.