Do you have existing PostgreSQL or Oracle workloads? You can take advantage of your familiar Postgres tools while benefiting from an intelligent Postgres database that offers a friction-free migration experience with a lower total cost of ownership on Azure. We offer multiple fully-managed, open-source database options for hosting your Postgres data.
Azure Database for PostgreSQL- Flexible Server is best for migrating and modernizing existing PostgreSQL or Oracle applications to Azure. Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL is ideal for building new cloud-native and highly scalable relational apps, powered by the open source Citus extension. Both options support the latest PostgreSQL versions and a wide range of popular PostgreSQL extensions and frameworks.
To get started, we’ve put together some factors to consider when choosing the right PostgreSQL on Azure to power your workloads.
Migrating and modernizing, or building new?
Azure Database for PostgreSQL is an intelligent open-source relational database with enterprise grade security and built-in high availability to ensure zero data loss for high performance data workloads. Flexible Server is the next-generation deployment on Azure Database for PostgreSQL that offers increased price-performance with support for burstable tier compute, improved uptime with a hot standby server, and a simplified developer experience. If you’re looking for a simple and friction-free experience to migrate and modernize your existing PostgreSQL or Oracle workloads to a fully managed Postgres database, choose Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server.
Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL is a native PostgreSQL globally distributed relational database that automatically shards data to help you build highly scalable apps. If you’re looking to build new apps and databases, choose Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL. When building from scratch, you can take advantage of cloud native development architecture patterns and technologies that allow you to build apps for any scale on a platform that scales with your needs.
Both Postgres options automate the management of your database infrastructure and take the administration out of your typical database management tasks, allowing you to focus on app development.
Types of workloads
Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server is optimized for migrating or modernizing existing Postgres or Oracle databases to Azure with a simple and frictionless migration experience that results in a lower total cost of ownership. Oracle workloads modernizing to Azure Database for PostgreSQL can also achieve reduced refactoring and reskilling benefits due to language similarities between PL/SQL and PL/pgSQL.
Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL is optimized for building new apps, multi-tenant SaaS apps, and high throughput transactional apps. The scalability of Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL enables you to host hundreds or thousands of tenants on a single cluster, but also isolate tenants into their own nodes on the cluster. This can be done online with no downtime and no application changes.
Performance and scalability
Azure Database for PostgreSQL- Flexible Server offers a high availability SLA of up to 99.99% and built-in automation for database maintenance, patching, and updates. Leverage intelligent tuning to optimize peak database performance based on usage patterns and independently scale compute or storage.
Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL offers fast, high-performance distributed PostgreSQL with scale-out to multiple nodes. You can build on a single node and scale out to clusters as your workload evolves, without any changes to your application. Multi-region read replicas give you globally scalable applications via low-latency reads across geographies & multi-region disaster recovery.
Savings
You can achieve a 62¹ percent lower total cost of ownership when migrating your on premises PostgreSQL database to Azure Database for PostgreSQL and take advantage of operational savings from decreased infrastructure database management. Leverage further cost savings with burstable or reserved instances and stop-start capabilities, paying for storage only when your database is stopped.
With Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL, you can start free on a single node and grow to any scale. At a few dollars a day, it's the most cost-effective way to experience Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL. Later, if your application requires greater scale, you can add nodes and rebalance your data.
The benefits of PostgreSQL on Azure
As fully managed database services, both Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL have all the features you need for worry-free operation in production, which include: automatic high availability, backups, scalable compute, multi-region replication, and encryption. Both database options are powered by the latest Postgres versions and support popular Postgres extensions such as PostGIS for geospatial, HLL for HyperLogLog, pg_cron for running scheduled jobs, and more.
Get Started
Try Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server for free. To learn more about Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server visit our website or check out our documentation.
¹Microsoft commissioned the Enterprise Strategy Group to conduct a study in July 2022 on the economic validation of migrating on-premises workloads to Azure Database for PostgreSQL. ESG validated that organizations have reported significant operational savings, have reduced risk, and have improved the speed of application development and delivery when migrating to Azure Database for PostgreSQL. ESG’s modeled scenario predicts that a medium-sized development organization with 18 developers and 145 general purpose and burstable PostgreSQL instances could realize savings of up to 62 percent over a three-year period, including an 84 percent lower cost of administration and up to a 164 percent return on investment (ROI). In addition, they could also realize improved revenue of $11.6 million with earlier release of products, improved application uptime, and improved product quality by using Azure Database for PostgreSQL.
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