To meet the needs of the digital economy of the 2020s, data architecture has evolved into a different animal than it was 10, or even 5, years ago. Most notably, there are three trends that have changed the way enterprises look at and design their data architectures. These are “the rapid rise in cloud services adoption, the increasingly agile and decentralized nature of corporate cultures, and the growing complexity of business problems,” according to Asanka Abeysinghe, chief technology evangelist with WSO2.
Ten years ago, SQL Server instances were cautiously being moved to on-prem virtual machines, observed Kathi Kellenberger, editor of the Simple Talk blog at Redgate and a Microsoft Data Platform MVP. “Today, there are many more options, especially with cloud offerings. For example, in Azure, you have the choice of running SQL Server in a VM but also in a managed instance or even as a database as a service with many options for scaling and performance. It’s also possible to use containers like Docker, which is especially useful for CI/CD pipelines.”