This is the first part of a multipart post about Azure Files. In this first post, we will cover the high level of what Azure Files are before we dive into further information about configuration or fine details about them.
What are Azure Files?
Azure files are fully managed file shares in the cloud located on an Azure Storage Account.
Azure File shares can be directly mounted by Windows, macOS and Linux with SMBv3 support.
Why would I want Azure Files?
Azure Files can be used to supplement or even replace traditional on-premises file servers.
It can be used in conjunction with Azure File Sync to replicate Windows Servers from either on-premises or in the cloud. This allows you to migrate file servers from on-premises, or in the cloud back and forth without having to do the traditional method of “Robocopy” like so many File Server migrations utilize.
The benefits of the Azure File Sync make it easy to also “Lift and Shift” applications to the cloud that are expecting a file share to store application data.
Great, I want to start utilizing Azure Files but I have a large amount of data
Azure Files supports individual file shares up to a 100TB. There are two tiers Azure Files offers from a performance perspective
Premium
- 100 TB limit
- Up to 100,000 IOPS
- Up to 5 GiB/s transfer
Standard
- 100 TB limit
- Up to 10,000 IOPS
- Up to 300 MiB/s
In the next post, we will walk through setting up Azure Files and start going into configuration details!
