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Azure Blob Storage - More storage and throughput

One of the core services of Microsoft Azure is Azure Storage that is used to store binary content, key-values pair (Azure Tables)  or message queue (Azure Queues). In today's post, we will discover how a small change in Azure Storage capabilities is changing our life and simplify our IT solutions.

Current solutions
The current maximum capacity of Azure Blob Storage used to be 500TB. Even if this might sounds a lot, there are multiple cases when you had to overcome this limits. If you have a system where devices and users are uploading content to your system, than you can reach easily 2-5TB per day that would force you to use a new Azure Storage account every 3 months.
To overcome this limitation, your solution needs to be able to manage Azure Storage accounts automatically. Besides being able to clean and archive content automatically, you will need a system that can create a storage account on the fly and redirect traffic to it. When you use multiple Storage Account, you are forced to store not only information related to what content you are storing, but also a mapping related to was Storage Account  has the specific content.
Even if creating and managing a Storage Account is not complicated, it is adding an extra complexity on top of your current application. This can be translated in extra management costs and possible bugs (or even strange behaviors that are hard to reproduce).

Small things like this make our life a little more complicated and force us to add more complexity to our system.

Blob Storage Throughput Increase 
I was happy to find out that these days might be over. At least for applications that are using less than 5PB of blob storage.
Azure Team just announced that they increased the capacity of blob storage from 500TB to 5PB. This is a big step forward, allowing us to plan and design our systems more simple. At least most of the application will not need to use multiple storage accounts to increase their storage capability.
Of course, when you increase the storage capability you also need to increase the bandwidth speed together with the number of transactions that are allowed (TPS). This was also increased with at least 2.5 times.

Below you can find the thresholds that were increased:

  • Max capacity for Blob storage accounts - 5PB (10x increase)
  • Max TPS/IOPS for Blob storage accounts - 50K (2.5x increase) 
  • Max ingress for Blob storage accounts - 50Gbps (2.5-10x increase)
  • Max egress for Blob storage accounts - 50Gbps (2.5-5x increase)65

Remember that this new limits applies only for Azure Blob Storage. For the other services the old limits remains the same.

Final thoughts
The current trend is looking good and put Microsoft Azure in a good position. When this kind of updates occurs, it is more than increasing the threshold of a service. It is about charring on what customer needs.
Yes, we had workarounds for these limitations, but Microsoft is making our life much better by offering us what we need.




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