This week Microsoft announced general availability of Managed Disks. With this PaaS-like support, you no longer need to be concerned with the complexity of storage management nor worry about storage as you scale. Yet, you still have the full power and control you expect and love with Azure VMs – a "PaaS bridge" on our IaaS VMs.
This not only simplifies the management of every VM created, it is exponentially helpful when deploying at cloud-scale with VM Scale Sets. Azure VM scale sets (VMSS) are a powerful way to reliably deploy massive cloud infrastructure without the overhead of coordinating multiple resources. With Scale sets, you can simplify the management of your applications with automated application scale and load-balancer integration. Today’s announcement extends these platform features to include automated disk management, enabling simpler storage management and even larger scale. With Managed Disks, you can now attach data disks to every instance and create a VM scale set of up to 1,000 VMs, a 10X increase.
These capabilities are just the beginning to bring the agility of PaaS to the comfort of IaaS. I look forward to announcing additional capabilities coming later this year, including OS patching support, application lifecycle integration, application health monitoring, and load-balancer app health integration.
Read more on the Microsoft Azure Blog.
