Azure Container Storage Now Available in Public Preview

Microsoft has announced the release of its Azure Container Storage solution. The new cloud-based service enables organizations to create and manage block storage volumes for container applications and workloads.

Previously, customers had to use individual container storage interface (CSI) drivers in order to offer cloud storage for containers. It caused various operational issues related to application availability, performance, cost, usability, and stability.

“Azure Container Storage is a cloud-based volume management, deployment, and orchestration service built natively for containers. It integrates with Kubernetes, allowing customers to dynamically and automatically provision persistent volumes to store data for stateful applications running on Kubernetes clusters,” Microsoft explained.

What are the benefits of Azure Container Storage?

Microsoft has highlighted the following advantages of its Azure Container Storage service:

• Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO): Azure Container Storage lets customers increase the scale of persistent volumes supported per pod/node to enhance cost efficiency.
• Boost VM-to-container initiatives: With this release, Azure block storage offerings (such as ephemeral disk and Azure Elastic SAN) are now available for containers. Up until now, these features were only available for virtual machines (VMs).
• Streamline volume management with Kubernetes: Azure Container Storage lets IT admins use the Kubernetes control plane to deploy and manage volumes within Kubernetes.

Getting started with Azure Container Storage

Microsoft’s new Azure Container Storage service supports three block storage types, including Azure Elastic SAN, Azure Disks, and Ephemeral Disk. It’s up to the IT admins to select any block storage solution based on their specific performance and pricing requirements.

Azure Container Storage is currently available in preview in the East US, West Europe, West US 2, and West US 3 Azure regions. Customers who are interested in participating in the preview can sign up on this page. Microsoft says that IT admins can deploy Azure Container Storage into their AKS clusters as a Kubernetes cluster extension via Azure Arc.