Embrace the future of container-native storage with Azure Container Storage

Announcing the general availability of Microsoft Azure Container Storage, the first platform-managed native container storage service in the public cloud.

We are pleased to announce general availability Microsoft Azure Container Storage, the first platform-driven container-native storage service in the public cloud. As Kubernetes drives the evolution of the cloud, we are witnessing a transformational shift as enterprises move from virtual machines (VMs) to containers while optimizing scalability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness. We are introducing Azure Container Storage to meet these requirements by providing best in class performance for the price for hosting state containers on cloud storage and delivery lowest latency on locally attached storage.

Azure Container Storage joins our suite of container services, tightly integrates with Kubernetes, and simplifies stateful workload management across a suite of comprehensive Azure storage offerings. Previously, customers needed to retrofit stateful workloads to virtual machine-centric storage options with scalability limitations or deploy self-managed, open-source container storage solutions. Because Azure Container Storage is purpose-built for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), it simplifies the process and allows developers to focus on innovating and running applications without having to worry about managing storage. By being able to perform all storage operations directly through Kubernetes APIs – such as creating persistent volumes and scaling capacity on demand – it eliminates the need to interact with the underlying infrastructure control plane APIs.

Azure Container Storage also simplifies storage management across different backup storage options. With its general availability, Azure Container Storage supports temporary disks (local NVMe and temporary SSDs) and Azure Disks, which is just the beginning of our journey to transform container storage environments. Ephemeral disk support represents a key moment for container users that it provides the most comprehensive volume management support for containers on local cloud storage. In addition to basic persistent volume (PV) provisioning, Azure Container Storage offers built-in features such as snapshots and auto-scaling that cannot be found outside of Azure.

During the trial, customers have already started using Azure Container Storage to develop their next-generation business-critical solutions. Azure Container Storage supports a wide range of tasks, whether it’s optimizing the performance of a Redpanda cluster on temporary disks or exceeding existing persistent volume limits for Postgres workloads on Azure disks. This is just the beginning for creating stateful applications running containers. Shortly after general availability, we will expand our offerings to include Elastic SAN and later options like Azure Blobs and Azure Files for shared storage use cases.

A cloud-native solution for all use cases

Azure Container Storage provides the necessary resiliency and security for every workload through integrated resiliency design and security enforcement.

Built-in resilience: Easily run highly available stateful applications in Azure Container Storage and protect against zonal failures at all levels of the resource hierarchy. You can choose between Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) options or multi-zone storage pools on Local Redundant Storage (LRS) to provide a highly available solution across zones. For local storage, we optimally place persistent pod volumes on temporary disks that exist on the same node as the AKS pod, reducing the number of points of failure that could impact the running of your application. In addition, we offer the best balance between availability, price and performance – we provide the most cost-effective block storage offering in the cloud with multi-zone support for high availability and sub-millisecond read latency.

Security by default: Safety is our top priority. By default, we offer server-side encryption (SSE) with platform-managed keys and enforce network security according to the appropriate backup storage options. Customers can further increase security through extensive options such as SSE with customer managed keys according to their security standards.

Modernization of existing applications

For all businesses looking to modernize their applications, Azure Container Storage consolidates management across familiar block storage offerings, simplifies workload migration, and provides backup and disaster recovery continuity.

We’re streamlining and consolidating the management experience across our comprehensive portfolio of well-known Azure block storage offerings. Instead of having to certify and manage multiple container orchestration solutions for each storage resource you deploy, Azure Container Storage effectively coordinates the provisioning of volumes within a storage pool, a concept we introduce to group storage resources into a single resource for your AKS cluster. This storage pool can be backed by your preferred storage option, allowing you to choose the most cost-effective resource tailored to your specific workload performance requirements. For example, Ephemeral Disk, newly introduced as a supported block storage offering for containers, is well-suited for latency-sensitive workloads that benefit from local NVMe storage or temporary SSD storage. KPN, a Dutch telecommunications company, shared their positive experience using Azure Container Storage with on-premises NVMe to host their mail solution on AKS:

“With Azure Container Storage, we were able to achieve better performance in our KPN consumer mail workload by leveraging ephemeral disks and leveraging the resource pooling that Azure Container Storage enables. Instead of manually configuring storage, we can focus on running our jobs and Azure Container Storage will automatically detect and format NVMe drives, making it easy to use and consistent with the Kubernetes way.

—Peter Teeninga, Cloud Architect, Personal Cloud by KPN

To make your journey to the cloud as painless as possible, we’ve partnered with CloudCasa, a key player in Kubernetes data mobility, to simplify mission-critical cloud migration. To continue supporting your cloud assets, we’ve partnered with Kasten, a leading data protection service for Kubernetes that offers robust backup and disaster recovery capabilities. See the next section for more details on our experience with data migration and backup provided by our partners.

Building cloud-native applications

For application developers building cloud solutions, Azure Container Storage offers seamless integration with Kubernetes and provides a native container environment designed for scalability from the ground up. This ensures that your applications can easily and cost-effectively grow over time. By supporting industry standard protocols such as NVMe-of and iSCSI, we simplify interoperability and provide additional performance options. For example, you can take advantage of the lower persistent connection and disconnection latencies that these protocols offer to achieve fast scaling and fast failover. Azure Container Storage allows customers to attach multiple storage resources to a single VM, increasing the limit to 75 volumes for any size VM. The added flexibility enhances customers’ ability to optimize Azure resources to meet their cost and performance goals. Sesam, a Norwegian data synchronization and management company, has effectively used this ability to reduce costs by scaling its persistent volumes more efficiently:

“Azure Container Storage (ACS) allowed us to achieve a lower total cost of ownership in our workloads. We have a large number of modules that need their own persistent volumes, and by using Azure Disks and pooling storage pool resources, we are able to accomplish this in a more cost-effective manner without hitting disk limits. which can be attached to a node. In practice, this allows us to allocate capacity more easily and efficiently.”

—Geir Ove Grønmo, Product Manager, Sesam.io

Data migration and backup support through our trusted partners

Highly efficient and operational storage management is the core environment that Azure Container Storage strives for. Azure Container Storage integrates tightly with two key third-party solutions—CloudCasa and Kasten—and offers you integrated migration, backup, and disaster recovery for workloads hosted on stateful containers.

With the ability to automatically recreate an entire cluster, CloudCasa centralizes cluster recovery and migration management, making it easy to move your existing Kubernetes workloads to and within AKS. To upgrade your existing Azure workloads, simply perform a full backup of your existing storage resources and then set up a restore, marking Azure Container Storage as the new storage resource for your cluster.

“With Azure Container Storage, Microsoft has removed much of the burden of managing Kubernetes storage, allowing development and DevOps teams to focus on their data and applications. This approach makes it easier for organizations to run stateful production applications at scale. We are pleased to have worked with the Azure Container Storage team to certify CloudCasa for backup and recovery of stateful applications running on it and to provide a co-tested solution for easy migration to it..”

—Bob Adair, Head of Product Management, CloudCasa By Catalogic

Kasten automates the complete backup and disaster recovery workflow and protects your Kubernetes clusters and application operations. When you deploy your storage pool in Azure Container Storage, you can enable Kasten during snapshot setup. Using dynamic policies, Kasten helps you manage backups at scale in a crash-consistent manner.

“With Azure Container Storage and Kasten by Veeam, organizations can maximize performance, flexibility and resilience while protecting their cloud-native workloads from ransomware attacks. Kasten by Veeam worked with Microsoft product and engineering teams to validate provisioning, volume snapshots, and recovery capabilities in Azure Container Storage to ensure that Microsoft and Kasten by Veeam customers can back up, protect, and migrate their stateful workloads to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Through our strategic partnership, we’re simplifying organizations’ cloud journeys without sacrificing performance, scalability or resilience.”

—Matt Slotten, Principal Solutions Architect, Cloud Native Partnerships Kasten by Veeam

What’s new with general availability?

Our announcement builds on the updates we shared during our preview and highlights several distinct features. We’ve improved the resilience of state containers with multi-zone storage pools and volume replication for local NVMe storage pools to protect against loss of availability during a single node failure. We also added snapshot support across all storage options for backup and disaster recovery. In addition, we have expanded the portfolio of temporary drives from local NVMe to include temporary SSD support that increases cost efficiency for use cases that can use directly attached local storage. With this announcement, we’re excited to introduce three new features that will further increase the resilience and performance of running stateful tasks:

Increase the resilience of your persistent volumes hosted on local NVMe storage (temporary L-series drives) with replication support.
Improved persistent volume recovery after Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster restart.
Customize the performance of your local NVMe storage with new performance level options.