The first step in becoming an Azure cloud database administrator is to plan how to deploy your databases into Azure. Planning database deployments has always been a highly complex undertaking. Our SQL data systems are almost always at the core of our company’s business operations. We are often tasked with achieving challenging levels of performance, scalability, and availability, all within limited budgets. Most of us have habits and practices for designing new platforms that we have developed over our careers. Several of these practices start well before the first bit of gear gets racked and stacked. We have these practices because many of the characteristics of our platforms become almost immutable once they have been deployed, or at least very expensive to change. We must get certain things right the first time in the on-premises world.