KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 in London was an exhilarating gathering, presenting a perfect platform to demonstrate Microsoft Azure Storage’s latest advancements. The Azure Storage team showcased initiatives that elevate performance, enhance cost-efficiency, and add AI capabilities for Azure workloads. A notable highlight was the optimization of open-source databases using Azure Disks. The latest Azure Container Storage update unlocks the potential of local NVMe drives, resulting in low latency and up to 500,000 IOPS, making it ideal for high-performance use cases. The new v1.3.0 update promises up to a 5x increase in transactions per second for PostgreSQL and MySQL, significantly improving database performance.
Another focus was on accelerating AI workflows using Azure Blob Storage and BlobFuse2, which allows handling data like a local file system while offering parallel access and data integrity at scale. This advancement caters to the needs of AI models that require enormous data sets for training and inference. Moreover, Azure Files has introduced a metadata caching feature to speed up CI/CD workflows, promising reduced latency by up to 50%, and a new Provisioned v2 billing model for better cost-control, offering scalability for file shares up to 256 TiB.
News: Learn more about what’s new with Microsoft Azure Storage at KubeCon Europe 2025
Documentation: Azure Container Storage Introduction
