Azure Winter Roundup 2016
With the weather starting to warm up and the sun out for longer, the worst of winter is behind us and we have spring to look forward to so what better time to wrap up 2016 with a recap of some of the new features to drop.
What’s New in General Availability
The all important GA milestone means these services are ready for prime time so here’s what’s new in the world of Azure since Al’s last update.
Managed Disks
Since the dawn of infrastructure as a service in Microsoft Azure, Storage Account management has been one of the burdens that stayed with us into the cloud. Like managing LUN mapping and disk tier balancing from on-premises SAN arrays, we had to get the right number of Storage Accounts with the right capacity and number of IOPS in each.
Managed Disks now allows us to offload that burden to Microsoft and means we can provision IaaS VMs with the storage complexity of PaaS (read none). When we provision a machine and select the option to use Managed Disks, the platform with create everything behind the scenes.
Managed Disks are available in Premium and Standard storage flavours but the gotcha here is that for standard, you pay for the fully provisioned disk size, not the thin provisioned in use size as you do with traditional Storage Accounts so some customers may wish to continue using the conventional methods for storage.
For the full story on Managed Disks, read on at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-general-availability-of-managed-disks-and-larger-scale-sets/.