New capabilities in Azure Government include Azure Premium Files to help you achieve the next level of performance and Azure Blob Storage for scalable, cost-effective cloud storage for all your unstructured data.

In addition, we recently announced the availability of SQL Database Managed Instance, Azure Dedicated Host, and Azure Storage Reservations in Azure Government. For a complete list of services, view Azure services by region.

Azure Premium Files

Azure Premium Files is a new performance tier that unlocks the next level of performance for fully managed file services in the cloud. Premium tier is optimized to deliver consistent performance for IO-intensive workloads that require high-throughput and low latency.

Premium shares store data on the latest solid-state drives (SSDs) making it suitable for a wide variety of workloads like file services, databases, shared cache storage, home directories, content and collaboration repositories, persistent storage for containers, media and analytics, high variable and batch workloads, and many more. Our standard tier continues to provide reliable performance to workloads that are less sensitive to performance variability and is well-suited for general purpose file storage, development/test, and application workloads.

With premium files, you can customize the performance of file storage to fit your workload needs. Premium file shares allow you to dynamically scale premium shares up and down without any downtime. The premium shares’ IOPS and throughput instantly scale based on changes to your provisioned capacity, while still offering low and consistent latency

This article: guidelines for building high performance applications using Azure Premium Storage can be used as a reference guide, combined with performance best practices applicable to technologies used by your application, for example SQL Server running on premium storage.

Azure Premium Files resources

• Azure Files documentation
• Azure Files FAQ
• Select an Azure disk type for IaaS VMs
• Scalability targets for premium page blob storage accounts

Azure Blob Storage

Azure Blob Storage provides scalable, cost-effective cloud storage for all your unstructured data. Pay only for what you use, and save money compared with on-premises storage options. Choose from among four storage tiers, depending on how often you’ll access the data. Store performance-sensitive data in Premium, frequently accessed data in Hot, infrequently accessed data in Cool, and rarely accessed data in Archive. Azure Blob Storage provides:

Strong consistency: When an object is changed, it’s verified everywhere for superior data integrity, ensuring you always have access to the latest version.

Object mutability: Get the flexibility to perform edits in place, which can improve your application performance and reduce bandwidth consumption.

Multiple blog types: Block, page, and append blobs give you maximum flexibility to optimize your storage to your needs.

Easy-to-use geo-redundancy: Automatically configure geo-replication options in a single menu, to easily empower enhanced global and local access, and business continuity.

Ideal scenarios for blob storage include:

• Serving images or documents directly to a browser
• Storing files for distributed access
• Streaming video and audio
• Writing to log files
• Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving
• Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service

Users or client applications can access objects in blob storage via HTTP/HTTPS, from anywhere in the world. Objects in blob storage are accessible via the Azure Storage REST API, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, or an Azure Storage client library. Client libraries are available for different languages, including:

• .NET
• Java
• js
• Python
• Go
• PHP
• Ruby

Azure Blob Storage resources

• Azure Blob Storage documentation
• Quickstart – work with blobs on the Azure Portal
• Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 on Azure Government – video