For over nine years, Microsoft Azure has provided completely managed file shares in the cloud.
Azure Files provides SMB3, NFS4.1 and REST based access to file shares.
This talk will present the evolution of architecture of Azure Files to serve applications with higher performance and scale needs, based on Azure Storage architecture under the hood, not on a conventional file system -- let alone NTFS. We will focus on features which provide the availability and reliability guarantees despite the constant din of hardware underneath suffering failures and needing replacement. Leveraging the Continuous Availability features of SMB3, users are able to access always available and highly reliable file shares. We will also deep dive into our approach to achieve security at cloud scale.
This talk will highlight recently added features and the engineering challenges of making significant changes and additions to data schemas and the code that manipulates it, while still allowing access to those many petabytes of data, or breaking the semantics that applications depend on. Additionally, this talk will discuss the significance of receiving an ack for the write requests from Azure File Server, how we build back state to continue serving data when client reconnects and customer focused challenges and how we overcame them.
