Wow, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 in London was a improbable time! Our Azure Storage crew was thrilled to trade insights and success tales at this vibrant group occasion. When 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 improbable time! Our Azure Storage crew was thrilled to trade insights and success tales at this vibrant group occasion. When 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 akin 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)—akin to operating these databases for transactional workloads—Azure Container Storage allows you to faucet into native ephemeral non-volative reminiscence specific (NVMe) drives inside your node pool. This supplies sub-millisecond latency and as much as half 1,000,000 IOPS, making it a robust match for performance-critical use circumstances. In our upcoming v1.3.0 replace, we’ve made important optimizations particularly for databases.
In comparison with the earlier v1.2.0 model, you’ll be able to anticipate as much as a 5 instances enhance in transactions per second (TPS) for PostgreSQL and MySQL deployments. When you’re searching for the very best stability of sturdiness, efficiency, and value for storage, Premium SSD v2 disks stays our really useful default for database workloads. Premium SSD v2 presents a versatile pricing mannequin that prices per gigabyte and consists of beneficiant baseline IOPS and throughput without cost 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 out there and performant PostgreSQL deployments. If you wish to observe alongside your self, take a look at the newly republished PostgreSQL on AKS documentation beneath!
Speed up your AI workflows with Azure Blob Storage
Constructing an AI workflow calls for scalable storage to host huge quantities of knowledge—whether or not it’s uncooked sensor logs, high-resolution photographs, or multi-terabyte mannequin checkpoints. Azure Blob Storage and BlobFuse2 with the Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver present a seamless method to retailer and retrieve this knowledge at scale. With BlobFuse2, you entry blob storage simply as a persistent quantity, treating it like an area file system. With the most recent model of Blobfuse2 – 2.4.1, you’ll be able to:
- Pace up mannequin coaching and inference: BlobFuse2’s enhanced streaming help reduces latency for preliminary and repeated reads. Utilizing BlobFuse2 to load giant datasets or fine-tuned mannequin weights straight from blob storage into native NVMe drives on GPU SKUs successfully optimizes the effectivity of your AI workflow.
- Simplify knowledge preprocessing: AI workflows typically require frequent transformations—akin to normalizing photographs or tokenizing textual content. Through the use of BlobFuse2’s file-based entry, knowledge scientists can preprocess and retailer outcomes straight in blob storage, maintaining pipelines environment friendly.
- Guarantee knowledge integrity at scale: When dealing with petabytes of streaming knowledge, integrity checks matter. BlobFuse2 now consists of improved CRC64 validation for knowledge saved on native disk, making certain dependable reads and writes, even when working with distributed AI clusters.
- Parallel entry of huge datasets: Carried out parallel downloads and uploads to considerably lower the time required for accessing giant datasets saved in blobs. This enhancement permits for quicker knowledge processing and elevated effectivity, making certain optimum utilization of GPU assets and enhancing coaching effectivity.
Scale your stateful workloads with Azure Recordsdata
Steady Integration and Steady Supply/Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, one of many common stateful workloads, want shared persistent volumes to host artifacts within the repository, the place Azure Premium Recordsdata is the storage of selection 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 crew not too long ago introduced the overall 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 sometimes host many small information in a single share. At KubeCon, we showcased how metadata caching can speed up repetitive construct processes on GitHub, confer with the repo and take a look at it out your self.
For much less performance-demanding stateful workloads, Commonplace Recordsdata with the brand new Provisioned v2 billing mannequin presents higher price 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 higher 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 straight 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 stay up for seeing you once more in November for KubeCon North America!
