Azure Managed Instance Time to Deploy

I recently did a blog announcing the impending arrival of Azure Managed Instance and couple weeks later it was released in Preview. Many of us were excited to deploy a managed instance and today I want to share something I found out about managed instances in my first deployment.

If you’re at that point and are ready to deploy one, this video demo will give you a little heads up about what is going to happen when you first deploy your managed instance:

• On my screen, you’ll see I have a managed instance group and inside that group, I have some resources that have been deployed to it.
• Let me backtrack a second – to deploy a new managed instance I click add and go about adding another Azure Managed Instance by typing in the search bar and selecting Create.
• Here’s the important thing I want to point out that I didn’t see the first time. When you scroll down to the bottom of the screen, you’ll see a message telling you that the first instance deployment time can typically take over 24 hours to complete. I missed this, so I had some issues in my environment which I’ll talk about in my next video/blog.
• It’s also important to note that you don’t get that warning text box if you were to execute deployment through a JSON template or an ARM template.
• Let’s go back to my deployment – you’ll see I have 3 succeeded deployments to this resource group within my Azure subscription.
• I can click on that text (3 Succeeded Deployments) to learn about those deployments, including my managed instance.
• You’ll see that the other two deployments had a duration time of seconds, but my SQL Managed Instance took 1 day, 13 hours.

Now you may be thinking, why would I want to deploy this if it’s going to take that long? And my answer is, because of all the benefits that Azure Managed Instance will provide. It’s a SQL Server without having to worry about the OS and patching. Even though you must wait over a day for it to deploy, the benefits well outweigh the wait for this first deployment.

Remember, Azure Managed Instance is still in preview. Give Microsoft more time to let this exciting service they are providing to bake in and it will get better. If you’d like to learn more about Azure Managed Instance or anything Azure related, you’re in the right place. Click the link below or contact us—we’re here to help you on your Azure journey.