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What is Azure Container Storage?

Azure Container Storage is a cloud-based volume management, deployment, and orchestration service built natively for containers. It integrates with Kubernetes, allowing you to dynamically and automatically provision persistent volumes to store data for stateful applications running on Kubernetes clusters.

To get started using Azure Container Storage, see Use Azure Container Storage with Azure Kubernetes Service.

Important

This article covers features and capabilities available in Azure Container Storage (version 2.x.x), which currently only supports local NVMe disk as backing storage. For details about earlier versions, see Azure Container Storage (version 1.x.x) documentation.

Why Azure Container Storage is useful

Traditionally, enabling persistent storage for containers meant manually configuring Container Storage Interface (CSI) drivers to connect with storage services designed for virtual machines. This approach often led to increased operational complexity and potential challenges with application availability, scalability, performance, and cost.

Azure Container Storage simplifies this process by providing a fully managed, Kubernetes-native volume orchestration solution. With Azure Container Storage, you don’t need to manage separate CSI drivers. Instead, you can use built-in storage controllers to create and manage storage directly in your Kubernetes environment. This makes storage management easier and more integrated with your containers.

You can use Azure Container Storage to:

  • Accelerate VM-to-container adoption: Azure Container Storage lets you use the same fast and powerful storage options in containers that were previously only available to virtual machines. For example, you can use local NVMe disks for workloads that need very low latency and high performance, such as databases (like PostgreSQL) and AI/ML workloads (like Ray and Kubeflow).

  • Simplify volume management with Kubernetes: Azure Container Storage enables you to provision, manage, and monitor storage volumes directly through Kubernetes-native tools and workflows. This unified experience eliminates the need to switch between multiple management interfaces, streamlining storage operations for your containerized workloads.

  • Enable cloud-agnostic deployments with open source: Azure Container Storage supports both Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and self-hosted Kubernetes clusters using open-source components. This means you can run your workloads in Azure or other clouds, making it easier to manage storage in multicloud or hybrid environments.

Key benefits

  • Seamless scaling of stateful pods: Azure Container Storage enables rapid scaling by mounting persistent volumes using high-performance network block storage protocols such as NVMe-oF or iSCSI. This approach ensures fast attach and detach operations, allowing you to dynamically scale resources up or down without risking application disruption. During pod initialization or failover, persistent volumes can be quickly reassigned across the cluster, enhancing application resiliency and supporting high-scale, stateful workloads on Kubernetes.

  • Optimized performance for stateful workloads: Azure Container Storage delivers high read throughput and near-native disk write speeds by using NVMe-oF over TCP. This architecture enables cost-effective performance for a wide range of containerized workloads—including tier 1 I/O-intensive, general-purpose, throughput-sensitive, and development/test scenarios. It also accelerates persistent volume attach and detach operations, reducing pod failover times and improving application resiliency.

  • Kubernetes-native volume orchestration: Seamlessly create storage classes and persistent volumes, manage the full lifecycle of volumes—including provisioning, expansion, deletion, and perform operations such as capturing snapshots, all using familiar kubectl commands. This unified approach eliminates the need to switch between different tools or interfaces, streamlining storage management within your Kubernetes environment.

Supported storage types

Azure Container Storage provides a Kubernetes-native orchestration and management layer for persistent volumes on Linux-based Kubernetes clusters. It uses existing Azure Storage offerings as the underlying data store. Currently, Azure Container Storage v2 only supports local NVMe disks for backing storage.

Storage type Description Workloads Offerings Provisioning model
Local NVMe Disk Utilizes local NVMe disks on AKS nodes Best for applications that require ultra-low latency and can tolerate no data durability or have built-in replication (for example, PostgreSQL). Available on select Azure VM sizes, such as Storage optimized VM sizes and GPU accelerated VM sizes. Deployed within a Kubernetes cluster. Automatically discovers and acquires local NVMe disks on cluster nodes for volume deployment.

Feature support for different storage types

The following table lists key features of Azure Container Storage and indicates if they are supported on local NVMe disks.

Feature Local NVMe
Ephemeral volumes Supported
Persistent volumes Supported1
PV expansion/resize Supported
Snapshots Not supported
Replication Not supported

1 By default, Azure Container Storage uses generic ephemeral volumes for local NVMe disks, meaning data isn't retained after pod deletion. To enable persistent volumes that aren't linked to the lifecycle of the pod, add the appropriate annotation to your Persistent Volume Claim. For details, see Create persistent volumes with local NVMe disks.

Regional availability

Azure Container Storage is only available for a subset of Azure regions:

  • (Africa) South Africa North
  • (Asia Pacific) Australia East
  • (Asia Pacific) East Asia
  • (Asia Pacific) Japan East
  • (Asia Pacific) Korea Central
  • (Asia Pacific) Southeast Asia
  • (Asia Pacific) Central India
  • (Europe) France Central
  • (Europe) Germany West Central
  • (Europe) North Europe
  • (Europe) West Europe
  • (Europe) UK South
  • (Europe) Sweden Central
  • (Europe) Switzerland North
  • (Middle East) UAE North
  • (North America) East US
  • (North America) East US 2
  • (North America) West US
  • (North America) West US 2
  • (North America) West US 3
  • (North America) Central US
  • (North America) North Central US
  • (North America) South Central US
  • (North America) West Central US
  • (North America) Canada Central
  • (North America) Canada East
  • (South America) Brazil South

Considerations for choosing a major version

Azure Container Storage offers two major versions: v1 and v2. Choose the appropriate version based on your underlying storage option.

  • Local NVMe disks: Choose Azure Container Storage v2.
  • Azure Disks: Choose Azure Container Storage v1. Azure Container Storage v2 doesn't have Azure Disks support yet.
  • Azure Elastic SAN: Choose Azure Container Storage v1. Azure Container Storage v2 doesn't have Azure Elastic SAN support yet.

Glossary

To better navigate Azure Container Storage and Kubernetes concepts, familiarize yourself with these essential terms:

  • Containerization

    Packing application code with only the operating system and required dependencies to create a single executable.

  • Kubernetes

    Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

  • Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

    Azure Kubernetes Service is a hosted Kubernetes service that simplifies deploying a managed Kubernetes cluster in Azure by offloading the operational overhead to Azure. Azure handles critical tasks, like health monitoring and maintenance.

  • Cluster

    A Kubernetes cluster is a set of compute nodes (VMs) that run containerized applications. Each node is managed by the control plane and contains the services necessary to run pods.

  • Pod

    A pod is a group of one or more containers, with shared storage and network resources, and a specification for how to run the containers. A pod is the smallest deployable unit in a Kubernetes cluster.

  • Storage class

    A Kubernetes storage class defines how a unit of storage is dynamically created with a persistent volume. For more information, see Kubernetes Storage Classes.

  • Volume

    A Kubernetes volume is a directory containing data accessible to containers in a given pod. Volumes can be persistent or ephemeral. Volumes are thinly provisioned within a storage pool and share the performance characteristics (IOPS, bandwidth, and capacity) of the storage pool.

  • Persistent volume

    Persistent volumes are like disks in a VM. They represent a raw block device that you can use to mount any file system. Application developers create persistent volumes alongside their application or pod definitions, and the volumes are often tied to the lifecycle of the stateful application. For more information, see Persistent Volumes.

  • Persistent volume claim (PVC)

    A persistent volume claim is used to automatically provision storage based on a storage class.

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