Categories: AzureSSIS

Migrating SSIS to Azure – an Overview

For quite some time now, there’s been the possibility to lift-and-shift your on-premises SSIS project to Azure Data Factory. There, they run in an Integration Runtime, a cluster of virtual machines that will execute your SSIS packages. In the beginning, you only had the option to use the project deployment model and host your SSIS catalog in either an Azure SQL DB, or in a SQL Server Managed Instance.

But over time, features were added and now the package deployment model has been supported for quite some time as well. Even more, the “legacy SSIS package store” is also supported. For those who still remember this, it’s the SSIS service where you can log into with SSMS and see which packages are stored in the service (either the file system or the MSDB database) and which are currently running.

The following Microsoft blog post gives a good overview of the journey that was made, and it’s a definite must-read for anyone who wishes to migrate their SSIS solution: Blast to The Future: Accelerating Legacy SSIS Migrations into Azure Data Factory.

Something that surprised me in this blog post was this:

“…our on-premises telemetry shows that SSIS instances with Package Deployment Model continue to outnumber those with Project Deployment Model by two to one”
Microsoft (Sandy Winarko, Product Manager)

This means a lot of customers still use the package deployment model. Many presentations at conferences about SSIS (even mine) are always geared towards the project deployment model. This is something I will need to take into account next time I present about SSIS.

Anyway, I have done some fair amount of writing on the Azure-SSIS IR:

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Koen Verbeeck

Koen Verbeeck is a Microsoft Business Intelligence consultant at AE, helping clients to get insight in their data. Koen has a comprehensive knowledge of the SQL Server BI stack, with a particular love for Integration Services. He's also a speaker at various conferences.