Deploy Azure SQL Database with Terraform

Azure SQL Database is Microsoft's fully managed relational database service, offering built-in high availability, automated backups, and elastic scaling without the overhead of managing virtual machines or operating system patches. When combined with Terraform, database infrastructure becomes version-controlled, repeatable, and auditable: critical properties for teams managing databases across development, staging, and production environments.

In this lab, you will write Terraform configuration files to provision an Azure SQL Server and database, configure server-level firewall rules for network access control, manage administrator credentials securely using Terraform sensitive variables, and output connection information for downstream application use. You will execute the full Terraform workflow from initialization through apply and verify the deployed resources in the Azure Portal.

Objectives

By completing this intermediate lab, you will be able to:

• Define an Azure SQL Server and database using Terraform azurerm_mssql_server and azurerm_mssql_database resources
• Use Terraform variables to manage administrator credentials securely with sensitive input values
• Configure server-level firewall rules using azurerm_mssql_firewall_rule to control network access
• Output the SQL Server fully qualified domain name (FQDN) and connection string from Terraform
• Execute the full Terraform workflow (init, plan, apply) to deploy database infrastructure
• Verify the deployed SQL Server, database, and firewall rules in the Azure Portal

Who is this lab for?

This lab is designed for:

• Cloud Engineers who need to provision and manage Azure SQL Databases using Infrastructure as Code
• DevOps Practitioners looking to automate database deployments as part of their Terraform-managed infrastructure
• Developers who want to understand how to define Azure database resources declaratively with Terraform