Microsoft Azure SMB File Sharing Service

Microsoft few days ago made some big announcements around its developer tools at an event held in Houston. In addition to the announcements, Microsoft had announced many changes that it had incorporated in the newly modifiedMicrosoft Azure, a pure platform cloud.

Azure Cloud Computing services aim to simplify the cloud storage. As such, it periodically incorporates changes and introduces new features. The latest change in the scheme of things bring forth massive amount of enhancements to Microsoft Azure.  Some new capabilities and announcements include new ways of accessing files, called Microsoft Azure Files. It allows files to be shared by multiple virtual machines by using the standard Server Message Block (SMB) Protocol –Microsoft Azure SMB File Sharing Service.

Microsoft Azure SMB File Sharing Service

Some of these features are available now while some are in preview mode. Others are likely to be launched in few days or months’ time.

I’m excited to announce the preview of the new Microsoft Azure File Service. The Azure File Service is a new capability of our existing Azure storage system and supports exposing network file shares using the standard SMB protocol.  Applications running in Azure can now easily share files across Windows and Linux VMs using this new SMB file-sharing service, with all VMs having both read and write access to the files.  The files stored within the service can also be accessed via a REST interface, which opens a variety of additional non-SMB sharing scenarios”, wrote Scott Guthrie of Microsoft.

 New SMB File Sharing Service provides high-availability managed service run by Microsoft. This means that you don’t have to have to worry about managing any VMs to coordinate it. The company simply takes care of all backups and maintenance for you.

Common Scenarios:

Lift and Shift applications: Azure Files makes it easier to “lift and shift” existing applications to the cloud that use on-premise file shares to share data between parts of the application.

Shared Application Settings: A common pattern for distributed applications is to have configuration files in a centralized location where they can be accessed from many different virtual machines. Such configuration files can now be stored in an Azure File share, and read by all application instances.

Diagnostic Share: An Azure File share can also be used to save diagnostic files like logs, metrics, and crash dumps. Having these available through both the SMB and REST interface allows applications to build variety of analysis tools for processing and analyzing the diagnostic data.

For more information and read the complete list of changes bought to Azure services, visit WebBlogs.