What Is Azure SQL?

“Bob, what is the cloud?” I vividly remember my beautiful and talented wife Ginger asking me this question when I walked in our kitchen one evening. I paused for a second, getting ready to present my incredible and thoughtful answer, and said “Well, you see the cloud is….” Fifteen minutes later (as Ginger recalls – I thought it was just a few minutes), Ginger politely interrupted me and said “Uh…I was kind of look for the CliffsNotes answer?” I was taken aback. How can anyone define the cloud as something so simple when it is such a complex topic and provides so much. I couldn’t let this go, so I spent the next few days researching a simpler answer that still defined the cloud. But I also wanted to make sure Ginger knew the answer to the question “What is Azure?”