Azure Files–Standard and Premium

Posted on February 2, 2022 by way0utwest

This is part of a series on my preparation for the DP-900 exam. This is the Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals, part of a number of certification paths. You can read various posts I’ve created as part of this learning experience.

I’ve been studying for the DP-900 exam, which is the Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals. This includes the Azure SQL options, but also plenty more, including Azure Files. I have never really used these, and wasn’t sure what this included, so I had to dig in a big and learn a few things.

This posts covers part of the concept of Azure Files and the differences with Standard and Premium, which were things that were not intuitive for me.

The Azure Files Basics

First, Azure Files provides file shares, as you might expect. These are SMB shares, which I would have guessed, and NFS ones, which I would not have guessed. These are based on Azure Storage accounts, so Azure Files is essentially a sub-section of a Storage account. You can mix these in a storage account, but that isn’t recommended. A little tidbit to remember.

There is integration with AD and AAD, as well as using the storage account keys. You can also sync local shares with Azure Files, all handy things.

The URL is : storageaccount.file.core.windows.net, where storageaccount is the name you’ve picked. I don’t love the flat namespace with me being inside it with all Azure customers, but I also don’t know how hard this is to manage. I’d at least like some storageaccount.region.file.core.windows.net or maybe some storageaccount.domain.file.core.windows.net.

Standard and Premium

As you might expect, there are two tiers for Files: standard and premium, As you might guess, one is HDD based (Standard) and one is SSD (premium). I’m sure you can guess one costs more (premium) than the other, and also has lower latency.

What was surprising to me was the makeup. Standard is a General Purpose version 2 (GPv2) account, while premium is a Filestorage account. More interesting to me is the GPv2 account can have queue, container (blob) or table storage, but the FileStorage is only for file shares. Premium is more limited, though with higher performance.

Lots of stuff seems to be geared to GPv2 storage, including data lakes, so I’m surprised here. FileStorage does allow NFS, whereas the GPv2 is only SMB.

The other thing is that the premium storage has LRS (local redundant) and ZRS (zone redundant), but not GRS (geographically redundant) options. That means that you have some less reliability/availability, though both are very reliable overall.

It makes sense that high performance SSDs might not be able to easily manage large files across geographic regions quickly, but it wasn’t what I intuited. I missed this on a practice test, so decided to write about it a bit and try to cement this in my memory.

Things to Know

If you are replacing an on-premises file share, Azure Files is what you use. Know that the redundancy differences, and understand the differences in the two levels.

Hopefully this helps you in DP-900 prep.

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Think Marathon, not Sprint

Posted on February 2, 2022 by way0utwest

I saw an article about automating responses to security issues being a marathon not a sprint. The articles gives a few examples of different levels of automation response to situations, noting that each of this is a different level of maturity in the organization. At early stages, the response is mostly alerting a human to take action. Later, the automation will make some changes, but still defer to a human for more actions. The final example is automation handling most of the issue itself. Note, none of this means humans are unaware of what responses are being made.

The idea is that improving security with automation is something that takes place across time, as the organization matures and becomes more comfortable and trusting of automation. It’s a marathon, where we push, but we know this will take some time to get to the end. It’s not a sprint where we make a quick fix and get a result.

Actually, I think a lot of things are marathons in the technology area. That’s if we are looking to improve how we work with automation. If we like just firefighting issues and building quick patches, then we’re constantly sprinting.

A lot of the work I do in advising clients about DevOps is to get them to think marathon. There isn’t really a finish line, but we are racing our competitors and trying to improve how we work. We just need to recognize that this is a process that takes months, not minutes. We want to mature and evolve processes, making them better over time. We also start small with our scope, hoping that we expand things to the entire organization over time, but again, that time is months.

This was my same approach as both a developer and DBA. Find something that I can automate to make better, start to improve it, learn from success and failure, and repeat. At some point, I usually found something was working well enough to move on to a new area to improve. If I needed to come back and continue to improve something, I could do that as well.

I don’t like sprinting. In real life, or in technology. I prefer to think marathon. We are pushing to achieve something, but with the further away future in mind, not the next few minutes.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

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Daily Coping 2 Feb 2022

Posted on February 2, 2022 by way0utwest

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

Today’s tip is to choose one of your strengths and find a way to use it.

One of my strengths is that I can grind away at tasks and get things done. I’m careful not to overcommit (most times) and being able to focus helps me work through the items I do agree to work on.

For me, I’ve been using this personally for the last month. I started a diet with my wife, limiting food intake and avoiding alcohol. I haven’t had a drink from Jan 1 through Feb 1. I dropped my calorie intake to about 1500 cal/day.

This hasn’t been too bad, but I think a couple of things from my strength help here. First, I know I’m paying a bit of penance for using food and alcohol to cope during the pandemic, at least a bit too much. Second, I have a routine of 3-4 days that I rotate through, and a fairly limited set of choices that I don’t dislike too much. I’ve been able to just keep pushing through hard days and looking forward to a new meal the next day.

Overall it’s worked well. I went from about 236-226 in a month and while I’m rarely satisfied and often a little hungry, it’s not as bad as some attempts in the past.

I think the penance thing has played to my strength.

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Daily Coping 1 Feb 2022

Posted on February 1, 2022 by way0utwest

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

Today’s tip is to take a small step towards an important goal.

One of the goals I have personally, and from work, is to take a few Azure tests. I’ve been studying here and there, but not with enough pressure. I decided to schedule the exam, and put some pressure on myself.

It’s a small step, but an important goal and a positive step.

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