[MS] Build locally, ship to Azure: meet Azure SQL Developer - devamazonaws.blogspot.com
Big news: Azure SQL Developer is here, in private preview. It's the Azure SQL Database engine, on your laptop, in a container. Build against the exact engine you run in the cloud. Ship the same code to Azure. Change one line, the connection string, and you're in production. Free for local dev and CI. No subscription. No credit card. No catch. Run it yourself, or hand it to an AI agent and watch it go. The inner-loop problem If you build apps on a cloud database, you know the friction. To develop and test locally, you either point your app at a shared cloud instance, with slow round trips, noisy neighbors, and connection-string rewrites between dev and prod, or you develop against a different database locally and hope the behavior matches once you deploy. Either way you pay a tax: cloud spend while you experiment, flaky integration tests, and the occasional "it worked on my machine" surprise when a local-only feature does not exist in the cloud. The fix is not ...