Wow, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 in London was a unbelievable time! Our Azure Storage group was thrilled to alternate insights and success tales at this vibrant group occasion. Should you missed it, don’t fear! We’re right here to share what we confirmed off on the con: how we’re enhancing efficiency, cost-efficiency, and AI
Wow, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 in London was a unbelievable time! Our Azure Storage group was thrilled to alternate insights and success tales at this vibrant group occasion. Should you missed it, don’t fear! We’re right here to share what we confirmed off on the con: how we’re enhancing efficiency, cost-efficiency, and AI capabilities for your workloads on Azure.
Optimize your open-source databases with Azure Disks
Open-source databases corresponding to PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and MySQL are among the many mostly deployed stateful workloads on Kubernetes. For situations that demand extraordinarily low latency and excessive enter/output operations per second (IOPS)—corresponding to operating these databases for transactional workloads—Azure Container Storage lets you faucet into native ephemeral non-volative reminiscence categorical (NVMe) drives inside your node pool. This supplies sub-millisecond latency and as much as half one million IOPS, making it a robust match for performance-critical use instances. In our upcoming v1.3.0 replace, we have now made important optimizations particularly for databases.
In comparison with the earlier v1.2.0 model, you may anticipate as much as a 5 occasions improve in transactions per second (TPS) for PostgreSQL and MySQL deployments. Should you’re in search of one of the best steadiness of sturdiness, efficiency, and price for storage, Premium SSD v2 disks stays our beneficial default for database workloads. Premium SSD v2 affords a versatile pricing mannequin that costs per gigabyte and contains beneficiant baseline IOPS and throughput without spending a dime out of the field. You possibly can dynamically scale IOPS and throughput as wanted, permitting you to fine-tune efficiency whereas optimizing for price-efficiency.
At KubeCon, we demonstrated how builders might readily make the most of native NVMe and Premium SSD v2 Disks to construct their extremely obtainable and performant PostgreSQL deployments. If you wish to comply with alongside your self, take a look at the newly republished PostgreSQL on AKS documentation under!
Speed up your AI workflows with Azure Blob Storage
Constructing an AI workflow calls for scalable storage to host large quantities of information—whether or not it’s uncooked sensor logs, high-resolution pictures, or multi-terabyte mannequin checkpoints. Azure Blob Storage and BlobFuse2 with the Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver present a seamless approach to retailer and retrieve this information at scale. With BlobFuse2, you entry blob storage simply as a persistent quantity, treating it like a neighborhood file system. With the newest model of Blobfuse2 – 2.4.1, you may:
- Velocity up mannequin coaching and inference: BlobFuse2’s enhanced streaming help reduces latency for preliminary and repeated reads. Utilizing BlobFuse2 to load massive datasets or fine-tuned mannequin weights instantly from blob storage into native NVMe drives on GPU SKUs successfully optimizes the effectivity of your AI workflow.
- Simplify information preprocessing: AI workflows usually require frequent transformations—corresponding to normalizing pictures or tokenizing textual content. By utilizing BlobFuse2’s file-based entry, information scientists can preprocess and retailer outcomes instantly in blob storage, protecting pipelines environment friendly.
- Guarantee information integrity at scale: When dealing with petabytes of streaming information, integrity checks matter. BlobFuse2 now contains improved CRC64 validation for information saved on native disk, making certain dependable reads and writes, even when working with distributed AI clusters.
- Parallel entry of large datasets: Applied parallel downloads and uploads to considerably lower the time required for accessing massive datasets saved in blobs. This enhancement permits for sooner information processing and elevated effectivity, making certain optimum utilization of GPU assets and bettering coaching effectivity.
Scale your stateful workloads with Azure Recordsdata
Steady Integration and Steady Supply/Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, one of many widespread stateful workloads, want shared persistent volumes to host artifacts within the repository, the place Azure Premium Recordsdata is the storage of alternative on Azure. These artifacts are saved in small information that incur heavy metadata operations on a file share. To hurry up CI/CD workflows, the Azure Recordsdata group just lately introduced the final availability of metadata caching for premium SMB file shares. This new functionality reduces metadata latency by as much as 50 %, benefiting metadata-intensive workloads that usually host many small information in a single share. At KubeCon, we showcased how metadata caching can speed up repetitive construct processes on GitHub, consult with the repo and check out it out your self.
For much less performance-demanding stateful workloads, Normal Recordsdata with the brand new Provisioned v2 billing mannequin affords higher value predictability and management as shared persistent volumes. The Provisioned v2 mannequin shifts from usage-based to provisioned billing, permitting you to specify required storage, IOPS, and throughput with larger scale. Now you can increase your file share from 32 GiB to 256 TiB, 50,000 IOPS, and 5 GiB/sec throughput as your purposes demand.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon was an exquisite alternative to instantly work together with builders and be taught from our prospects. As all the time, because of our prospects and companions for contributing to the occasion’s worth and significance, and we sit up for seeing you once more in November for KubeCon North America!
