Hello and thank you for tuning
in to another online session.
My name is Alec Becker.
I'm a program manager with the Azure
Disk Team and this presentation is
how to scale your performance cost
effectively with Azure Disk Storage.
Azure Disk is the best value
persistent storage for your business
Critical workloads.
These four characteristics of Azure
Disk makes Azure the best place to run
your mission critical applications.
We are durable as we have the promise
of never losing your data and we
are the only cloud provider who
can say that they've achieved a 0%.
Annual failure rate.
Customers love the fact that
they do not have to worry about
losing their data with us.
We offer a 99.9% percent for a single instance
VM using premium or ultra disk on Azure.
This is the highest single VM SLA for
any VM running in the public cloud.
With our money back guarantee sla,
you can bet on our disk to provide your
application with high availability.
We offer easy solutions to
migrate your workload to Azure,
complete with a rich API
support along with an advance
Ecosystem to give you the best
experience with the cloud,
giving you the flexibility to
come to the cloud on your terms.
Finally,
we are the leaders of innovation
with advanced cloud technology like
shared disk where a single disk can be
mounted to multiple VM simultaneously,
unblocking many workloads on
premise that cannot be run on
any other public cloud but Azure.
We offer a variety of disks on Azure,
each purposely made for different scenarios
when evaluating Azure disk for your workload,
you should primarily care about
the following.
IO performance Characteristics Latency,
which is how long it takes for a piece
of data to be written in persisted IOPS,
which is how many input and output
operations that can be made in
a single second and throughput,
which is how much data can be
transferred in that second.
Once you have a grasp of your
workload requirements,
you can then start evaluating which
Azure disk is right for you.
On Azure,
we offer four different disk products.
Each product offer different
performance options and are best
suited for different scenarios.
First up, we have the standard HDD disk.
It is the most cost
efficient block storage offering on Azure.
It is best suited for dev
and test environments.
An infrequent access workloads that are
less sensitive to performance variability.
If you're looking for an inexpensive storage
where consistent performance isn't critical,
standard HD is the Azure disk for you.
Next up, we have the standard SSD disk,
which is the lowest GB per
dollar cost of an SSD on Azure.
The standard SSD gives your applications
more consistent performance.
And better latency than standard HDD.
The standard SSD is great
for entry level production.
Workloads that require
consistent performance.
Next up,
we have a premium SSD which gives
you the ability to get higher
IOPS and throughput than standard
SSD. And our premium SSD's are
amazing for production workloads
where performance is critical that
requires higher IO throughput.
Now finally, if you're looking
for the highest IOPS in most
throughput for a disk on Azure,
look no further than our Ultra
disk this disk performs with sub
millisecond latency and enables you
to dynamically scale your storage
capacity and performance parameters,
which the IOPS and throughput and it is
our latest and greatest offering on Azure.
Let's get into what we've
been hearing from you.
Are users of Azure.
We have been getting tons of feedback
about how the platform should go and
we are always eager to hear from you.
We heard that you want more flexibility
with your performance options.
You want more performance when you need it,
while at the same time you also want to
be cost conscious for this performance.
We have heard that you want to be
able to scale up and scale down when
you want to because your applications
and workloads will need varying
performance at different times.
And when you do scale up or scale down,
you want no downtime to occur,
so your applications are.
Always available,
we hear you and we share that
vision with you.
We have new features that help with
both unplanned and planned performance.
Scaling up scenarios before we get
into the wonderful features that
can help with performance scaling,
let's go over a couple of common
unplanned scaleup scenarios.
The 1st is a boot up scenario
where you turn on your VM.
During this process there is a bunch
of activity going on with the OS disk,
so ideally you want to want a quick
pick me up with your disk performance
to get your VM up and running quickly.
The next is a small batch scenario
where all of a sudden your application
hit a particular checkpoint.
It needs to do a bunch of reading
or writing to that to a disk.
A scenario like this could be
running a consolidation report
once a checkpoint is hit.
And another unplanned scale up scenario
could be an unforeseen wave of this traffic.
You could have a web application
Anna Back End database suddenly
get slammed with a ton of traffic
that could cause a slowdown.
In this situation you would want
to scale up to give your users and
customers the best experience possible.
Here on Azure we have just the
features to address these scenarios
called bursting and it allows you
to go above your regular storage
performance limits and it comes
in two different flavors.
The first flavor is credit based bursting.
And it is available on both VMs nand
premium disc with credit based bursting.
We allow you to get high short term
performance for up to 30 continuous minutes.
You can cut costs with this bursting
feature as you no longer must provision
your VM and disks for peak performance,
but just the average performance.
Credit based bursting is completely
free and enabled by default
so you do not have to do anything to get
this boost in performance for the VMS.
You can get throughput up to 8 times
higher than your regular and you
can get also 25% more IOPS as well.
With VM bursting is currently available
in all regions for the LS_v2,Ds_v3,
and Es_v3 families. For disk you can
get IOPS up to 30 times your provision,
IOPS and throughput up to 7 times.
Credit based bursting is available on
our half TB disks or P20 and smaller,
and Lastly with credit based.
First thing, we have some amazing
new metrics for the bursting disc.
These metrics help you understand and
gain insight with the performance on
premium disks with credit based bursting
and I have an excellent demo to show you
that right now in this demo I'm going
to showcase our new person metrics.
And I'm going to do this by
spinning up a VM and disk in Azure,
which I've already done.
So and then I'm going to be running a
disk right load using the FIO tool,
I'm going to let that run for 30 minutes,
and then afterwards we'll take a
look at the corresponding disk bursting
metrics which are brand new.
So before we get into that,
let's just go run through the
setup that we've got here.
So I've got a standard D4S_V4 VM
which is capable of doing 6400 IOPS.
And then attached to it.
I've got a data disk,
the P4 data disks which can normally
just do 120 IOPS but with bursting.
It can do up to 3500 apps.
So now that we've gone through the setup,
let's go ahead and go into a terminal.
Alright,
so I'm going to go ahead and SSH into our
The VM spun up in Azure NOTE Confidence: 0.824643999999999
Type in my password.
And I'm gonna go ahead and run Fio.
Two stress tests are VM and disks
for the Max amount of IOPS that
can do and look at that
We're getting our burst amount
of 3500 and so we're going to let
this run for about 30 minutes and
then we're going to come back and
take a look at the new bursting
metrics on the Azure portal.
Alright, so our FIO program has complete.
It ran for about 30-40 minutes so let's
go ahead and see what that does to our new
bursting metrics that we have released.
So I'm going ahead and looking at
our disk write operations because
we did a write operation with FIO.
Let's go ahead and change the aggregation
into this to Max to see what it was.
The maximum it was getting and
it looks like we're getting.
Fairly consistent performance of
3500 IOPS over that bursting period,
which is what the P4 disk is
allowed to burst up too, so let's add
on to these new bursting metrics,
which I'm very excited about,
so let's go ahead and zoom in real quick
and add these new bursting metrics.
So the first one shows the
data disk Max Burst IOPS,
so this provides a visual line of
what your data disk can burst up to.
and then let's go ahead and
add another metric for the target
IOPS and this is what your data
disk is a provision to always get.
So for the P4 it's 120 IOPS and
then it can get up to 3500 items.
This is great and cool,
but I'm going to go ahead and show
you my favorite new bursting metrics.
So I'm going to start a new
chart for this one and this is the.
Data disk use Burst IO credits
percentage and this one is really
really cool 'cause it tells you how
much of your bursting credits have
you use at a particular point in time.
So as you can see in the chart below,
we ramp up and we start using our
bursting an on the chart up above
the Burst use percentage slowly
starts to increase until there you
have burst through all your credits
and it maxes out at 100%.
And these are cool new visual tools,
visual metrics to help you understand
your bursting, and bursting workloads.
Now, credit based bursting is great.
However,
what if you want higher performance
for unplanned events and you also
do not want to be capped at the 30
minutes of continuous Max bursting?
This is where our brand new on
demand bursting comes in to save
the day with on demand bursting,
you get unlimited bursting on a pay as
you go model for both IOPS and throughput.
It is an optional feature because you incur
an additional fixed cost to enable it,
and then you incur variable costs
for each additional IOP and MB
per second at a small write.
This feature is available on premium
SSD's size P30 and higher and with it
you can get up to 30,000 IOPS and 1
gigabyte of throughput on a single disk.
This feature is available on preview
and we've been getting great feedback
so far for optimizing for both
performance and cost.
It helps with the variability of
this traffic and users love it
so far that they only have to pay
for the performance that they use.
Now let's switch gears and talk
about the plans scaled up scenarios.
These scenarios include workloads
that have seasonal patterns,
like education servers who need to
scale up during the day to accommodate
the student traffic and scale back
down at night or a gaming server who
needs to scale up during the nights and
weekends to handle all the increased
traffic or special event going on
online like Black Friday on Azure,
we have two great offerings available
for these types of scenarios.
The first offering that we have that
can address the plan scale up scenario.
Is performance tiers on premium SSD
before performance tears in order to
increase your premium SSD's performance
you had to change the disk size,
which was an irreversible action.
Now we're performance tiers,
we have decoupled the disk
performance with size,
allowing you to scale up and
scale down performance without
changing the disk capacity.
This way you can scale up to
gain additional performance for
your workload when it needs it,
and then you can scale it back down
when your workload no longer needs it.
This is excellent not only because
you can get the additional performance
when you need it,
but also you can lower costs as well
because you can provision for the
baseline performance and not the peak.
And now I'm very excited to say you can
change performance tiers with no downtime.
This is awesome because you no longer
need to shut down your VM or detach a
premium desk to Tune its performance
Changing tiers with no downtime is available today
in a limited preview with wide GA coming soon.
Now let's take a closer look at the
performance tears in action with a demo.
Alright,
so in this demo I'm going to show
you the new performance tier with no
down time before we get into this,
I want to show you this setup we've got here.
So I've got a standard D8s_v3
VM which can get up to 12,800 IOPS,
non bursting and attached to it.
I've got a P10 disk.
Here that can do 500 IOPS numbers thing,
but it can also get 3500 IOPS of bursting.
And what I'm going to show you is
this VM and disk being stressed
using a tool called Iometer to its
fullest IOPS potential,
and while this is going on I will change
the disk performance Tier 2 a P40.
So what we will see is the iometer
tool getting a performance of 3500
IOPS originally and then I will
go in using the Azure CLI tool to
change the performance tier.
Then after a little while the performance
of the disk will then go up to 7500 IOPS,
which is what the P40 can do.
And all of this will be done with
no downtime.
Alright,
so I've gone ahead and logged into
my VM on Azure and I've started
my IOmeter application.
Let's go ahead and kick this
tool off to see
what performance we are getting before
we change the performance tier.
So we're getting around 3500 IOPS,
which is as expected from
a P10 with bursting.
Now let's run an Azure CLI command
that changes the performance
tier of our disk to a P40.
And like that the command is successful.
So let's go take a look back at our
iometer and see the change in performance
tier take effect and it has looked the
performance tier change has gone into effect.
Now are attached disk has the performance
of a P40 disc at 7500 IOPS and this
is excellent with performance tiers.
You now can decouple storage
performance with capacity and you
can now scale up and scale down.
Performance without any downtime.
Finally, our most performant,
inflexible disk on Azure is ultradisk.
Ultradisk gives you the
flexibility to set capacity,
IOPS and throughput independently,
allowing you to get high IOPS and
throughput even at lower capacities.
With Ultra Disk
you can also dynamically scale
your performance without detaching
the disk from the VM,
so you can adjust your performance
based on your business needs,
helping you reduce your overall cost.
Ultradisc was designed to deliver
high performance with sub millisecond
latency for your most top tier
demanding applications like SQL Server,
SAP Hannah and Oracle DB,
each requiring high IOPS and
throughput as well as.
This also helps with latency sensitive
applications like Mongo DB and Maria DB.
In summary,
we have a great selection of
flexible performance disk offerings,
each great for different scenarios.
Here's a great comparison table
for these different offerings.
We recommend both bursting offerings,
credit based and on demand for
unplanned scale to scale up events
and we recommend performance tiers.
An ultra disk for plan scaled up events.
If you need a short term jump in performance,
we recommend are bursting offerings.
If you need more long lasting,
we recommend performance tiers and ultradisc.
These offerings all have different
cost models where one will be
the most cost effective.
Efficient for your scenario,
these offerings also run on
different disk types and sizes.
The bursting model,
models and performance tiers
run on premium disk,
which have low single digit
latency whereas the ultradisc
has sub millisecond latency.
As far as enabling all these offerings with
on demand bursting and performance tiers,
you must manually enable them.
While credit based bursting
is enabled by default.
If you'd like to learn more,
go ahead and check out these links and will
put them in the description below as well.
We always love hearing from.
Our users on Azure please reach out to
azuredisk@microsoft.com if you have any
questions or feedback you'd like to give us.
Thanks for tuning in.
We'll see you next time and take care.