As enterprises accelerate cloud adoption and increasingly deploy performance sensitive cloud-native applications, we are 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.
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
To get started with Premium Blob Storage you provision a Block Blob storage account in your subscription and start creating containers and blobs using the existing Blob Service REST API and/or any existing tools such as AzCopy or Azure Storage Explorer.
We are very excited about being able to deliver Azure Premium Blob Storage with low and consistent latency and look forward to hearing your feedback at premiumblobfeedback@microsoft.com. To learn more about Blob Storage please visit our product page.
