Wow, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 in London was a incredible time! Our Azure Storage group was thrilled to change insights and success tales at this vibrant neighborhood occasion. For those who 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 incredible time! Our Azure Storage group was thrilled to change insights and success tales at this vibrant neighborhood occasion. For those who 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 eventualities 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 categorical (NVMe) drives inside your node pool. This offers 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, now we have made important optimizations particularly for databases.
In comparison with the earlier v1.2.0 model, you may count on as much as a 5 instances enhance in transactions per second (TPS) for PostgreSQL and MySQL deployments. For those who’re searching for the perfect stability of sturdiness, efficiency, and value for storage, Premium SSD v2 disks stays our beneficial default for database workloads. Premium SSD v2 presents a versatile pricing mannequin that expenses 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 obtainable and performant PostgreSQL deployments. If you wish to comply with alongside your self, try 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 large quantities of information—whether or not it’s uncooked sensor logs, high-resolution photos, 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 knowledge 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:
- Pace 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 straight from blob storage into native NVMe drives on GPU SKUs successfully optimizes the effectivity of your AI workflow.
- Simplify knowledge preprocessing: AI workflows usually require frequent transformations—akin to normalizing photos or tokenizing textual content. By utilizing BlobFuse2’s file-based entry, knowledge scientists can preprocess and retailer outcomes straight in blob storage, preserving 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, guaranteeing 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 quicker knowledge processing and elevated effectivity, guaranteeing optimum utilization of GPU sources and enhancing coaching effectivity.
Scale your stateful workloads with Azure Information
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 Information 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 Information group lately introduced the overall availability of metadata caching for premium SMB file shares. This new functionality reduces metadata latency by as much as 50 p.c, 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 check out it out your self.
For much less performance-demanding stateful workloads, Commonplace Information 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 functions demand.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon was an exquisite alternative to straight work together with builders and study from our prospects. As at all times, because of our prospects and companions for contributing to the occasion’s worth and significance, and we look ahead to seeing you once more in November for KubeCon North America!
