Hey friends! Object storage or file storage?
Why choose? Azure Blob storage?
is the only cloud object storage
provider with both object and
file multi-protocol support,
which eliminates those data silos
with a single storage platform.
Yuan is here to show me how NFS 3.0
provides native file system access
to your blob storage endpoints.
Today on Azure Friday.
Hey friends, I'm Scott Hanselman
and it's Azure Friday.
I'm here with Yuan Zheng.
How are you? Good, how are you Scott?
I'm very excited to chat with you
today 'cause you're going to go
and make all my storage problems
go away with some new cool stuff
happening on Azure blob storage.
Yes exactly.
Yeah, so we're going to talk about.
We are going to talk about a
new capability called NFS 300,
so poor for Azure blob storage today.
An interesting BLOB storage is great.
It's so flexible and you can
do all kinds of cool things,
and you've layered this on
top of BLOB storage,
so my Linux VMS will just think it's
a share and it's just going to work
right exactly if traditionally you
know how today customers actually
need to maintain object storage
and file storage is separately
and a lot of application existed
really rely on NFS in the past
two decades and it's really hard,
and it takes a lot of time
to realize those four.
Object storage is so there has
been a problem for a lot of
customers and we heard them.
We want to offer a way for them
to come to object storage without
changing the applications.
Just come and use it and they
get all the benefits that object
storage offers with a scale.
With our low cost economics and on top
of that they don't really anything,
so that's what we're going
to talk about today.
That's cool that's so great because
Azure BLOB storage is as we know,
so affordable.
And that means that all of my existing apps,
if they know how to talk
to an NFS mount point,
then they don't need to be even
know they're in the cloud.
We're going to library gaps and they
won't even know they're in the cloud.
That's going to be great.
Alright, let's see.
Let's see it.
Cool, so I have a single slide here to just go
over couple the high level points here.
So as I mentioned,
this is a brand new capability
and this is something that no
other public cloud storage offers.
It's very unique to Azure BLOB storage.
What it is that we often native
file system support on top of BLOB
storage endpoint and that means you
get the atomic directory, rename.
There's a hierarchical namespace
on top of object storage,
although that comes to you for free.
And everything is built on top of objects.
To do so,
you still get the existing high slope
high scale for the workloads you're running,
and in addition you get all those
BLOB storage economics here.
That means there's no minimum
provision capacity here.
You can have a single file stored and
still achieve our maximum throughput here.
Object storage give user
multiprotocol support there with NFS,
three doro with our existing blob
Rest API and also our adls Gen.
Two API for oil analytic workloads.
So you no longer need to manage
separate storage for
object for file.
For analytics everything exists on a
single storage platform with a single
pricing point there, that's cool.
In addition, we give you all the existing
capability block storage offers,
such as the different performance tiers.
You can gather very low.
You can get the tier premium of SSD backed
premium key with extremely low latency.
And you can gather lower costs, hot or cold.
Here you can even hear your data down for
your back up and long term retention data
into our offline archive storage tier.
And that gives you a really good
life cycle management for your data.
In addition, all those rich block feature
capabilities such as lifecycle management,
customer manager keys, redundancy options,
all of them exist for this on day one.
That's cool.
I really like the multiple performance tears
'cause I've got different kinds of data.
Some of it I wanted an SSD.
I want it to be fast, fast,
fast and other times I backup 50 gigs into
a place and I don't need it for months.
I'll use the archive tier which
is really nice.
Yes, a lot of customer help down
there and it also goes in with our
automatic support lifecycle management,
right?
Like so your data newly created data
tends to be a little harder and over
the time ages and you don't want to
pay for the premium tier for that as
our point you want to tear down and
that's what we can help with that
there's options for customers to choose.
That's cool.
Very nice,
alright?
So with that I'm going to go through
a quick demo to just show how
easy it is to use this capability.
So here we what we have is a storage account.
So as you can see, I quit NFS
demo storage account here on it's
created in one over Canary regions.
But right now this feature is in
our general availability state,
so it's available in all regions
I happen to create it a while
ago when it's still in preview
and eating our country region.
Now let's come down and look
into the configuration quickly.
So as you can see I have NFC enabled here.
This setting, once you enabled
it cannot be turned off.
'cause once you layer a namespace
hierarchical namespace file
system on top of object storage.
We really don't want customers
going and disabled because there's
some data loss risk there and
This is why once it's enabled,
the data is always going
to help file system access.
No, let's go look into networking,
and once I think customers
are familiar with is,
NFC is not the most secure protocol,
I would say right.
So like you know it's it's been a there
for a while and a lot of security
wasn't really building there, right?
So what we have been doing is
we enforce very strict network
security here 'cause there's
limited user identity security.
So what we're saying is only
a selected network here in my
virtual network has access.
Two this NFS share or server.
Otherwise everything else gets dropped.
Now because object storage have very
very sophisticated user identity,
or that I can actually give a little
more permission for the object storage,
so I do give some special rules
for my access.
So for example I'm running Azure
portal here that's actually running
in my machine right now now within
that network and I can see all those
data because I'm going through a
deauthentication versus for NFS.
It has to be within the network
because we don't have the capability
or including aid in there because
the protocol doesn't allow it right?
'cause NFS has been around for a
very long time and that's why we get
that great compatibility with legacy apps.
But you're using the power of
software defined networking to give
almost a physical security because
you're have virtual switches and
virtual networks that are then
segmenting that that storage away.
So that's that's a great way of of
having the power and the security
of the cloud.
But still that legacy support
for something like NFS 3.
Exactly so now,
let's go back here and see my container.
So the way it works is that
a storage account is.
Equivalent to,
say,
a nice array there and within there
we can create couple containers
and each other container really is
equivalent to say a volume that you
can export it and you can bounce
out with your with the Linux client.
OK, so it's here so I have a container
basically volunteer named demo
and let's go in there and you can
see there's nothing here yet.
So now let me show you I have a
VM running in the same region with
the same virtual network setup,
so this VM will have access to the
volume idea shared and this is IP address.
So let me try to.
SSH into that.
VM,
so here I am in this VM what I'm going
to do is mount this as you can see,
this is how we can mount it.
I'm doing just a very standard
mount mount call here
with NFS demo as a storage account
name and then with volume name
demo here cold winter months at.
Now let's go into the mounted volume.
As you can see, nothing there right?
So let's go back to my portal view.
And I will go upload something.
So in this case I'm just uploading or
getting a file into Azure storage using my.
Lesaca using my broadcast API.
Standard way of doing it,
so let me see if I upload a file.
And you see Pablo and the file shows up here,
and this can immediately be viewed.
Yep, in my VMware NFS and so
everything is visible zero.
That's just one part of the multi protocol.
Now let's see another part which is now.
Let's say I'm running some
kind of workload here.
Now I'm going to run a simple. Uhm?
Fio here just a simple IO cache here.
Running couple jobs and writing
some files and getting some files.
So let's kick it off.
As I showed earlier,
the VM is not super powerful,
so people please ignore the the
bandwidth and all their numbers.
You can get way higher in numbers
with our limits and or there exists
just happened to be a single mum
point with a single square running.
Here I'm not going to give you the
best performance but it just shows
as a example that I can run those.
Easily and as you can see as part
of the workload created some files.
They did some kind of red wine.
It has shown some kind of
aggregated bandwidth.
Now let's go back to my portal
view and I'm going to refresh here.
As you can see, everything shows up here.
Now I can manage all of
this via my rest API here.
So everything from Portal going
through rest or as you can see in my
Linux client I can see all the files.
I can do say remove them all.
Actually.
No, if I want videos.
If I want to just remove
everything I can write so.
Back here and this is good here.
So sad is how easy it is to use this just
once this volume created with NFS enablement,
the client just connects to it.
In fact, as you mentioned earlier,
the client doesn't even know it's
talking to some cloud storage.
Everything just works.
A lot of customers been using this
since we announced this feature.
Their goals for things such as
very critical business critical
applications such as media of
transcoding on financial risk analysis.
But autonomous driving for
their simulations a lot.
Murray HPC workloads have take
advantage of this capability.
That's cool,
and you uploaded that like you said,
with the rest API,
because that's the rest API is
what's behind the Azure portal here,
but you could have used the
Azure Storage Explorer or AZ
copy or any of those other tools
that already talked to Azure.
So then the legacy application talks
to a mountpoint and it doesn't care.
And all of your existing
tools talked to blob storage,
blob storage works great.
And everybody wins.
You nailed it exactly.
Although ecosystem tools works that
everything the BLOB storage we have
built up over the year works here.
In addition, and office works.
So the existing application can just
be moved over while customers thinking
about their cloud storage going forward,
they don't really need to
make this hard decision.
Do I rewrite my application
for object or not?
No need to make that decision,
just move it.
Take your time when they are ready.
They can move the object or when they.
Don't want to just stick with NFS here.
And by the way,
as I mentioned earlier,
cannot turn off in a Best Buy
your data stored in the storage
account per GB is the same cost
as storing just as BLOB storage.
The only additional cost customer may
pay is when they use NFS protocols.
A little extra to maintain the
hierarchical namespace so the operation,
like right is slightly more expensive
than paying for the BLOB storage right?
It's about 30% extra, but really,
that's the additional costs.
But compared to the whole thing
is just so easy and it's so cheap
for customer to just move on.
Come here, that's cool and I can do this now,
right?
I could go and learn about the exactly,
and as you can see we have documentation
showing people how to do it.
This is just overview quickly.
We also.
If you Scroll down,
there's a couple links here that
talks about how to do it step by step,
so there's a step by step guide.
We also have very detailed
performance guidelines on how do
you achieve the best performance.
As I mentioned,
the best thing to do is
probably have multiple clients.
It's probably going to be having larger iOS,
have more Raider head.
All those caching and buffering.
Options turned on.
I just didn't set it up here about
all of that is documented here and we
even have a quick comparison to some
of the other file system solutions
out there for customers to make
easy choice on when to pick work.
Very cool, this is super helpful.
Thank you so much for sharing this.
Thank you alright,
I am learning all about Azure BLOB storage
and the new features with NFS three,
so I have a single storage platform
to eliminate those data silos.
Today on Azure Friday.
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