Microsoft Container-Native Storage with Azure Container Storage.

Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Azure Container Storage, the industry's first platform-managed container-native storage service in the public cloud. As Kubernetes continues to drive cloud evolution, enterprises are increasingly shifting from virtual machines (VMs) to containers to optimize for scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency. Azure Container Storage is designed to meet these demands, offering best-in-class price performance for hosting stateful containers on cloud-based storage and delivering the lowest latency on locally attached storage.

Key Features:

• Seamless Integration with AKS: Azure Container Storage is purpose-built for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), simplifying the management of stateful workloads. This integration allows developers to focus on innovating and running applications without the burden of managing storage.
• Kubernetes API Operations: Perform all storage operations directly through Kubernetes APIs, such as creating persistent volumes and scaling up capacity on demand. This eliminates the need to interact with the control plane APIs of the underlying infrastructure.
• Multiple Storage Options: With its general availability, Azure Container Storage supports Ephemeral Disks (local NVMe and temp SSD) and Azure Disks.

Benefits:

• Optimized Performance: Azure Container Storage provides low latency and high performance for stateful containers, making it ideal for a wide range of workloads.
• Simplified Management: By streamlining storage management across multiple backing storage options, Azure Container Storage allows developers to focus more on their applications and less on infrastructure.
• Advanced Capabilities: Beyond basic persistent volume provisioning, Azure Container Storage offers built-in capabilities such as snapshots and autoscaling, features that are unique to Azure.

For those building stateful applications operating containers, this is great beginning. Microsoft plan to expand their offerings to include Elastic SAN and later, options like Azure Blobs and Azure Files for shared storage use cases. For more information and to get started, visit Introduction to Azure Container Storage | Microsoft Learn