Azure File Storage general availability

We are pleased to announce the general availability of Azure File Storage. Customers can now leverage fully managed file shares from Azure File Storage for production with these new capabilities:

• Support of SMB 3.0 – Increased file share availability and the ability to mount file shares from anywhere (Azure or on-premises).
• New File Explorer functionality in Azure Portal – New UI for managing shares, including the ability to upload and download files to/from Azure File Storage and much more.
• Metrics for Diagnostic – Enable Storage Analytics for Azure File Storage.

Please read the Azure File Storage GA announcement blog post to learn more. New to Azure File Storage? Look at How to use Azure File Storage to get started.

Azure SRP (Storage Resource Provider) enhancements

Azure SRP now offers two new APIs:

• Get Operations – Displays the list of available SRP operations.
• Get Usage – Displays the number of accounts created by a subscription and the max number of accounts that can be created (100).

Please refer to our Azure SRP Enhancements blog to learn more. You can read up on all of the SRP REST APIs by visiting our Azure SRP reference documentation.

New SAS capabilities

We are pleased to announce three new capabilities for Shared Access Signatures:

• Storage Account SAS – Storage Account SAS will deliver full parity with storage account keys – providing a more secure alternative to delegating access to storage users than storage account keys provide. Account SAS functionalities are being rolled out in two phases – with the first phase enabling full Blob and File access including management of blob containers and File shares. The second phase will complete the Account SAS capabilities with Queues and Table support being available in the next two months.
• Protocol SAS – Tokens of account level or service level SAS can now be restricted to HTTPS only.
• IP Restricted SAS – An optional parameter that specifies an IP address or a range of IP addresses outside of Azure (see the section Routing session configuration state for Express Route) from which to accept requests.

With these improvements, SAS should meet the needs of developers and administrators in a wider array of scenarios, significantly reducing the need to use the account’s Shared Key.

Refer to our Shared Access Signatures documentation to learn more about these new SAS capabilities.

Premium Storage improvements

The following improvements have been made to Premium Storage:

• Copy a blob snapshot from a premium storage account to more cost effective standard blob storage.
• Restore a previously saved blob by promoting a blob snapshot to a base blob.

Azure Import/Export in new regions

We are excited to announce that Azure Import/Export will be launching in the Australia and Japan regions in Q4 of 2015. Customers who wish to import large amounts of data into their Azure Storage accounts in the Australia or Japan regions can ship disks to a local data center instead of shipping disks to an alternate region.

Public Preview Announcements

Azure Storage iOS client library preview

We are excited to announce the public preview of the Azure Storage client library for iOS. Please refer to our blog announcement to learn more. You can start using Azure Storage in your iOS apps now by visiting the Azure Storage iOS Client Library Readme.md file on GitHub.

Data Movement Library (DMLib)

We are pleased to announce the preview release of DMLib (Data Movement Library) – a new Azure Storage library designed for high-performance uploading, downloading, and copying of Azure Blobs and Azure File Storage. Our AzCopy tool has always provided support for high-performance data transfer via a command-line interface. However, developers have always wanted an “AzCopy-like Library” they could program against. We’ve listened and now we’ve provided the core component used by AzCopy as an open-source library. The source code also includes getting started samples such as migration of data from AWS S3.

Please read our DMLib announcement blog to learn more.

Java client-side encryption

The Azure Storage client library for Java will soon support client-side encryption complementing the existing capability in the Azure Storage client library for .Net. This allows developers to encrypt Block Blob, Table, Queue and Append Blob data before sending it to Azure Storage. Additionally, integration with Azure Key Vault will be supported so you can store and manage your keys in Azure Key Vault. Watch for more info to be released on our blog soon!

Azure Storage Samples

We are working on a new Azure Storage Samples strategy that delivers a centralized consistent user experience. We will start by focusing on code samples for the most common Azure Storage usage scenarios written in .NET, Java, and Node.js. We will continue with more advanced Azure Storage end to end scenarios and best practices in the next couple of months. Please visit the Azure Storage Samples Gallery and the Azure-Samples GitHub organization to get started.

Finally, if you’re new to Azure Storage, please visit the Azure Storage documentation page. It’s the quickest way to learn about Azure Storage and includes five-minute getting started videos for Storage, Premium Storage, and Files.

Thanks!

Azure Storage Team