When the Microsoft SQL Server team started working on supporting Linux for SQL Server 2017, their entire test infrastructure was, naturally enough, on Windows Server (using virtual machines deployed on Azure). Instead of simply replicating that environment for Linux, they used Azure Container Service to produce a fully automated test system that packs seven times as many instances into the same number of VMs and runs at least twice as fast.
“We have hundreds of thousands of tests that go along with SQL Server, and we decided the way we would test SQL Server on Linux was to adopt our own story,” SQL program manager Tony Petrossian told the New Stack. “We automated the entire build process and the publishing of the various containers with different versions and flavors. Our entire test infrastructure became containerized and is deployed in ACS.
Read more at The New Stack
