Hi, everyone.
Welcome to Azure IaaS Day.
My name is Mike Emard,
I'm a Program Manager on the Azure Files Team,
and that's what we're going to talk about in this session.
I'm going to give about 10 minutes
to an technical overview of Azure Files,
and then we're going to do a demo of Azure File Sync.
So Azure Files are fully managed SMB and NFS file shares
in the cloud.
We offer a standard tier of performance,
which is hard drive based,
and also a premium tier, which is all SSD based.
And with this wide variety of tiers,
you can do a wide variety of different workload.
Everything ranging from general purpose file shares
all the way up to enterprise applications and databases.
Regardless if you're using standard or premium,
these shares are very easily managed.
Microsoft's going to handle all the operating system updates
and hardware updates and everything like that.
You just have to manage the share.
There's multiple redundancy levels.
So even at our baseline redundancy of LRS,
we're keeping three copies of your data.
Then we offer zonally redundant storage.
So even if an entire zone in a data center goes down,
you're still up and running with no downtime.
We offer geo redundant storage
and a combination of geo and zone redundant storage.
These shares are hybrid in nature.
You can access them from anywhere.
You can access them from on-premise,
you can access them in the cloud,
and you can use the technology that we call Azure File Sync
to even create an on-prem cache
and optimize that on-premise experience.
These shares are cross-platform as well.
Because it's just standard SMB and NFS,
you can connect to them from Windows or Linux or Mac.
So a little bit about how the technology works.
First you just go create a file share in the portal
or with some API calls.
That's going to give you our URL and a file share.
From there, you can connect to the file share
from on-prem directly over SMB,
and this is all encrypted over the internet.
You can optionally tunnel that traffic all over a VPN.
You could also use our Azure File Sync product,
which will actually install an agent
on a local Windows server.
That Windows server will provide SMB and NFS locally,
but it'll translate all those calls into REST
and talk to Azure Files over a REST protocol.
You could optionally tunnel it out over a VPN.
If you're connecting using NFS 4.1 from on-prem,
you have to use a VPN.
For NFS 4.1, there's no protocol encryption
on the wire at this point.
And of course, from virtual machines
in the cloud and containers,
you can connect directly to the Azure File Share
using SMB, NFS, or REST.
So that was the brief overview.
I want to give a little bit more detail in these four areas.
I want to talk a little bit more about security, pricing,
integrated data protection with Azure Backup,
and hybrid file shares using Azure File Sync.
With security, we recently added support for SMB 3.1,
including AES-256-GCM encryption.
This is the highest level of encryption that's out there.
In fact, only the latest Windows clients support it.
We also have Kerberos Active Directory Integration,
so you can get fine grain access control to your data.
This supports your on-premise AD environment,
as well as Azure AD DS.
And again, 256 bit encryption for the Kerberos auth.
From the networking perspective,
you can put these file shares on VNET, VPNs,
there's private end point support.
And you can really lock down these shares
to only things that you're using.
If you don't want to use NTLM
or you don't want to use that REST protocol,
you can turn all these things off
so you can have a really secure file share.
All right, so we're going to get into little more detail
with the different tiers.
I mentioned earlier,
there's a premium tier that's all SSD-based.
This is for really low latency applications.
Within the standard tier, we have three different tiers.
The first is transaction optimized.
And as the name implies,
if you're doing a lot of transactions,
this tier is probably right for you.
It's kind of the highest within the standard tier.
We also have a hot tier,
which is kind of the middle of the road,
general purpose workloads.
And then we have a cool tier,
and this is for lightly access shares.
Think about, like, active archive scenarios.
From a performance standpoint,
you're going to see about three milliseconds of latency
on the premium tier for small I/Os.
You can push up to a hundred thousand IOPS
and 10 gigabytes a second of throughput.
For the standard tiers,
the latency is going to be between 15 to 200 milliseconds.
And if you're on that transaction optimized tier,
you're actually going to be more consistently down there
at the 15 millisecond range.
That's because we're keeping three full copies of your data
versus hot and cool,
where we'll be erasure coding the data.
So you can get about 20,000 IOPS
and about 300 megabytes a second per share
with the standard tier there.
And then in terms of pricing,
cost per gigabyte goes down
as you move from premium to cool,
but the transaction price goes up.
Starting with no additional transaction price in premium
and going up down to cool.
There's a whole separate video
on how you pick the right tier,
so please go look for that in our documentation.
All right, now we're going to talk about
integrated data protection with Azure Backup.
So first of all, this works based off incremental snapshots.
So you're only going to be paying for the extra data
on top of your primary data
and the difference between those snapshots.
It's a customer defined backup policy,
so you can take daily, weekly, monthly, yearly backups,
specify how many you want.
There's granular restore.
So you can restore individual files or folders
as well as the entire share.
And you can either restore in place
or to an alternate location.
And Azure Backup is going to manage all of this for you
and make it really easy.
Now a little bit about Azure File Sync,
and this is the piece that we're going to demo after this.
So first of all, Azure File Sync supports multi-site sync.
So you can install an Azure File Sync agent
on multiple Windows file servers,
and they're going to sync to the same Azure File Share
and provide access to that same data in multiple locations.
We also support cloud tiering.
So although all the data will be in the Azure File Share,
you only need a subset of the data
at these local file servers,
and they've just become a cache.
So Azure File Sync will actually track the frequency
and recency of the data and will kick the oldest data out.
You define how much local cache you want to use.
And we just talked about Azure Backup,
so you get cloud backup and disaster recovery,
not only for things like ransomware or something like that,
where you need to restore the whole share,
but also from local server failures.
It's very easy to add another server to this sync group
and be up and running very quickly.
And last but not least,
because this is just a file share in the cloud,
you can natively access that file share directly in Azure.
All right, so now we're going to talk a little bit about
what's new with Azure Files.
So we've had NFS 4.1 in preview for quite a while.
We are hoping to announce GA of that very soon,
so stay tuned for that.
We talked about the recent addition of SMB 3.1.1
with the new encryption algorithm there.
And there's a lot of things about increased performance.
So we've given more read and write performance
on the premium tier by removing a 60/40 split.
So now you can have 10 gigabytes of second
of all reads or all writes on a premium share.
We've added SMB multi-channel,
which gives you three times more IOPS and throughput
from a single VM.
And there's even more performance announcements coming soon,
so please stay tuned.
Okay, now we're going to go into a demo,
but before we do that,
I'm just going to give you the steps
that we're about to perform in the demo
so you can follow along easier.
This is going to be a demo of Azure File Sync,
and the first thing we're going to do is
we're going to create an Azure File Sync instance in Azure.
Next we're going to install the Azure File Sync agent
on a local Windows server.
Then we're going to create an Azure File Share.
And the last step here will be
to connect all of these together using a sync group.
Okay, so the first thing we're doing is
we're going into the Azure portal here
and looking for Azure File Sync.
It's pretty straightforward
to create this Azure File Sync service.
We really just need to pick the resource group
and then give it a name.
Okay.
All right, so while that is finishing up,
we're going to jump over to the local Windows file server.
We've already downloaded the install agent,
so we're just going to run this installer.
Now for the most part,
we're just going to be accepting the default options here.
There is one checkbox here that I recommend.
This is going to keep you on the latest version of the agent
to make sure you have all the latest bug fixes
and performance improvements and features.
So I encourage you to check that box there.
Okay, so now the agent is actually installed on the machine,
but now we need to register it
with that Azure File Sync service that we had just created.
And so I'm going to log in
with the same credentials that I would use
to log into the Azure Portal.
And I'm putting my password in here,
but we also have multifactor auth,
so it's going to contact me on my phone as well.
Okay, so now we've authenticated,
and now I just need to register this local agent
with that Azure File Sync instance.
So I'm just going through all of my subscriptions here.
I'm going to pick that resource group that we were using.
All right, and there's that Azure File Sync instance
that we had just created.
Okay, so you can see the successful registration.
And now it's just going to do a quick network test
and make sure that everything is fine
for synchronizing the data up to the cloud.
All right, everything's passed.
So now we can go back to the Azure Portal.
So if you can see here,
there's that server that we just registered.
We haven't connected it to any Azure File Share yet.
We haven't even created the file share,
so that's what we're going to do now,
we're going to go create a storage account first,
because file shares live within storage accounts.
All right, now we just make sure it's still in East-US-2.
All right, so creating a storage account is fairly quick.
Once we have this storage account created,
we're going to go ahead and create a file share
within the storage account.
Okay, for this file share,
we just need to give it a name and choose the tier.
I recommend transaction optimized for any initial migration.
Migration is going to generate a lot of transactions,
and this is going to be the most economical for you.
You can always come back
and change this tier to hot or cool later, by the way.
It's just a click in the portal.
All right, so now we're going to go back
to the file sync service,
and we're actually going to connect
the file share with the server by creating the sync group.
We have to select the storage account that we just created.
There it is.
And specify the share that we just created.
Okay, so now we've told Azure File Sync
that we want it to sync that Azure File Share,
which happens to be empty right now.
We've created this sync group.
And now we have to add that local server to the sync group
so that local server will start synchronizing data
to that Azure File Share.
All right, and remember that we have the F drive
here on this local server.
It's got a few folders there and a HelloWorld.txt file.
That's the stuff we expect to sync up
to the Azure File Share.
So we're just going to specify the F drive here.
And we'll go ahead and enable cloud tiering
just so you can see the options.
Now you get to specify
how much free space you want to keep on that drive.
20 is usually about a good amount.
These other options don't apply to this scenario
where we're syncing up a server that already has the data,
but you have a lot of different options
for what you want to do
when you add a new server to a sync group.
It could start downloading the cache automatically.
You can set it up to pre-fetch data
whenever something else gets synced from another server.
But for now,
we're just going to accept the rest of those defaults.
All right, so let's actually
go look at this file share now in Azure
and see if it synced it all up.
Okay, there it is.
Pretty quick.
So you can see that there's actually a naming issue there.
I added .txt.txt,
so we'll actually fix that as part of this demo.
You can see there's the test file there.
So what I'm going to do is
I'm going to flip back to that local server,
I'm going to rename this file, remove that extra .txt.
And then we'll change the contents a little bit as well.
Okay, this is pretty fast.
We have a filter driver that's actually listening
for file changes on there on the Windows server.
So this is going to detect those changes
and sync them up pretty quickly,
especially given that this is just a small text file.
So we just give it a second
and then click over to the portal and refresh.
And there you go.
You can see that the name change has already taken place.
And if we look at the content,
you'll see that is the new file.
So that's your demo for Azure File Sync.
There's a lot of links to learn a lot more
about Azure Files and File Sync.
And I encourage you to go check those out,
and I want to thank you very much for your time.