Azure Premium Block Blob Storage is now generally available

Claus Joergensen Principal Program Manager, Azure Storage

As enterprises accelerate cloud adoption and increasingly deploy performance sensitive cloud-native applications, Microsoft is excited to announce general availability of Azure Premium Blob Storage. Premium Blob Storage is a new performance tier in Azure Blob Storage for block blobs and append blobs, complimenting the existing Hot, Cool, and Archive access tiers. Premium Blob Storage is ideal for workloads that require very fast response times and/or high transactions rates, such as IoT, Telemetry, AI, and scenarios with humans in the loop such as interactive video editing, web content, online transactions, and more.

Premium Blob Storage provides lower and more consistent storage latency, providing low and consistent storage response times for both read and write operations across a range of object sizes, and is especially good at handling smaller blob sizes.

Your application should be deployed to compute instances in the same Azure region as the storage account to realize low latency end-to-end. For more details on performance see, “Premium Block Blob Storage - a new level of performance.”

Figure 1 - Latency comparison of Premium and Standard Blob Storage

Premium Blob Storage is available with Locally-Redundant Storage (LRS) and comes with High-Throughput Block Blobs (HTBB), which provides very high and instantaneous write throughput when ingesting block blobs larger than 256KB.

Pricing and Region Availability

Premium Blob Storage has higher data storage cost, but lower transaction cost compared to data stored in the regular Hot tier. This makes it cost effective and can be less expensive for workloads with high transaction rates. Check out the pricing page for more details. (Remember that your price through Velocity Group will be less)

Premium Blob Storage is initially available in US East, US East 2, US Central, US West, US West 2, North Europe, West Europe, Japan East, Australia East, Korea Central, and Southeast Asia regions with more regions to come. Stay up to date on region availability through the Azure global infrastructure page.

Platform Interoperability

At present, data stored in Premium cannot be tiered to Hot, Cool, or Archive access tiers. We are working on supporting object tiering in the future. To move data, you can synchronously copy blobs using the new PutBlockFromURL API (sample code) or AzCopy v10, which supports this API. PutBlockFromURL synchronously copies data server side, which means all data movement happens inside Azure Storage.

In addition, Storage Analytics Logging, Static website, and Lifecycle Management (preview) are not currently available with Premium Blob Storage.

Next Steps

Contact us to discuss your Azure migration requirements and to plan your migration correctly.