If we want to avoid public networks while interacting with cloud or on-premises data stores, we must use this type of runtime. It consists of a service that is installed on a machine on our domain. This machine must have access to the data that we want to access from ADF. The data could be in any on-premise data store, like SQL Server, Oracle, CSV files, and so on. Basically, a self-hosted runtime is a gateway that allows ADF to connect to data on a private network.

In future examples, we'll copy data from WWImportersDW to an Azure storage account. We'll use this runtime to access the data in our SQL Server on Windows.