Compare access to Azure Files, and Blob Storage with NFS
This article provides a comparison between each of these offerings if you access them through the Network File System (NFS) protocol. This comparison doesn't apply if you access them through any other method.
For more general comparisons, see this article to compare Azure Blob Storage and Azure Files.
Comparison
| Category | Azure Blob Storage | Azure Files |
|---|---|---|
| Use cases | Blob Storage is best suited for large scale read-heavy sequential access workloads where data is ingested once and minimally modified further. Blob Storage offers the lowest total cost of ownership, if there is little or no maintenance. Some example scenarios are: Large scale analytical data, throughput sensitive high-performance computing, backup and archive, autonomous driving, media rendering, or genomic sequencing. |
Azure Files is a highly available service best suited for random access workloads. For NFS shares, Azure Files provides full POSIX file system support and can easily be used from container platforms like Azure Container Instance (ACI) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with the built-in CSI driver, in addition to VM-based platforms. Some example scenarios are: Shared files, databases, home directories, traditional applications, ERP, CMS, NAS migrations that don't require advanced management, and custom applications requiring scale-out file storage. |
| Available protocols | NFSv3 REST Data Lake Storage |
SMB NFSv4.1 (No interoperability between either protocol) |
| Key features | Integrated with HPC cache for low latency workloads. Integrated management, including lifecycle, immutable blobs, data failover, and metadata index. |
Zonally redundant for high availability. Consistent single-digit millisecond latency. Predictable performance and cost that scales with capacity. |
| Performance (Per volume) | Up to 20,000 IOPS, up to 15 GiB/s throughput. | Up to 100,000 IOPS, up to 10 GiB/s throughput. |
| Scale | Up to 5 PiB for a single volume. Up to 190.7 TiB for a single blob. No minimum capacity requirements. |
Up to 100 TiB for a single file share. Up to 4 TiB for a single file. 50 GiB min capacity. |
| Pricing | Azure Blob Storage pricing | Azure Files pricing |
Next steps
- To access Blob storage with NFS, see Network File System (NFS) 3.0 protocol support in Azure Blob Storage.
- To access Azure Files with NFS, see NFS file shares in Azure Files.