If this question has already been asked sorry in advance. 

We have a confusing situation with our SQL licensing. We have our vendor that is doing our Arena -> Rock conversion and we also have our IT consultant company and their answers do not line up so I wanted to throw this out to the community. 

We are putting our Rock environment in the Azure cloud thanks to the $5000 per year donation. Because we are a larger church we are building out using the guidelines for large organizations (D2-IIS, D11-SQL). Building out machines is the easy part of this until we get to SQL licensing. Below I will outline the 2 scenarios we have been given.

Rock Migration Vendor: Says to build the D11 server in Azure then purchase the SQL STD core licensing from Techsoup and install. This put the project cost for SQL at a one time cost of less than $800 

IT consultant: States that to be legal we need to purchase our SQL license through Azure since we are using their virtual platform. The Yearly cost of this option is $3,500 

Personal Research: I have found documentation that support both of these options which has made the situation less clear to me.

I have started to do some side research to see if we can use SQL web version to run Rock because this option is much cheaper to purchase through Azure, if you have any insight on that topic it would be greatly appreciated also. 

Thank you