Premium storage is used for situations requiring lower latency and higher performance. This is enabled through high-performance hardware associated with the presentation of storage within Azure, such as through solid-state drives (SSDs), and provides faster throughput and input/output operations per second (IOPS) compared to standard storage, which is backed by hard disks (spinning disks). Thisstorage is typically used for block blobs and append blobs. It supports LRS and ZRS redundancy options.

Example workload types include the following:
• Workloads requiring fast access and functionality, such as e-commerce applications
• Large datasets that are constantly added, manipulated, and analyzed, such as internet of things (IoT) applications
• Artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) applications
• Data transformation workloads

Top Tip
Storage is measured in binary units; when translating back to the decimal number system, this does not always reflect as 1 to 1 and depends on the terminology or unit used. For instance, we know that 1 megabyte (MB) is technically equal to 1,024 kilobytes (KB); however, we often write 1 MB as 1,000 KB. Therefore, to reflect the correct measurement, we would write this as 1 MiB to reflect we mean 1,024 KiB.

Azure file storage
With Azure Files, you can create file shares in the cloud. You can access your files using the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, which is an industry standard that can be used on Linux, Windows, and macOS devices. Azure files can also be mounted as if they were a local drive on these same devices as well, and they can be cached for fast access on Windows Server using Azure File Sync. File shares can be used across multiple machines, which makes them suitable for storing files or data that is accessed from multiple machines, such as tools for development machines, configuration files, or log data. Azure Files is part of the Azure Storage client libraries and offers an Azure Storage Representational State Transfer application programming interface (REST API) that can be leveraged by developers in their solutions.

Premium file shares storage
Premium storage is used for situations requiring lower latency and higher performance. Premium file shares are typically used for workloads requiring enterprise-scale or high-performance applications. The service presents storage in the form of SMB or Network File System (NFS) storage. SMB is typically used for Microsoft Windows-type environments such as Windows Server, whereas NFS is typically used for Linux-based environments. NFS can only be enabled on premium file shares. Some differences worth noting when choosing your file-share storage service are IOPS and provisioned storage limitations. GPv2-backed file shares have a limit of 20,000 IOPS and 5 pebibytes (PiB) of provisioned storage, while premium file shares storage offers 100,000 IOPS but only 100 TiB provisioned storage.

Top Tip
Blob storage has a flat-file hierarchy, meaning that it does not work as a filesystem, as we are traditionally used to working with on servers and workstations. While containers may appear as folders, they are only logical structures to emulate a filesystem. Bearing this in mind, blob storage is not meant to be consumed directly as a shared storage system such as SMB or NFS, but through technologies such as blobfuse, direct storage into a blob can be achieved.

The next chapter will explore more about blob management and will include sections such as blob life cycle management, replication, the Azure File Sync service, versioning, and data protection.