Ben Johnston has an after-action report:
I was recently on a project to migrate a very transactional installation of SQL Server to Azure SQL Managed Instance (MI). SQL Managed Instance is a good stepping stone between a full, on-prem SQL instance / Azure VM and an Azure SQL Database. It has most of the functionality of a full, on-prem instance, with management of the SQL engine, backups, OS and underlying hardware done by Microsoft. It allows you to use cross database queries and run SQL Agent jobs, with fewer limitations than Azure SQL Database migrations.
The migration process isn’t completely seamless. During the migration of this system, we encountered several surprises. Hopefully, this will help you avoid, or at least be prepared for these differences from the on-prem version. This also reinforces the importance of testing each aspect of your migration.
This is part one of a two-parter and focuses on issues during the deployment process. Ben promises a follow-up with post-deployment issues you could run into. I expect that’s where the “What is this performance?” issues will come into play.