Premium SSD v2 and Instant Access Snapshots: A Better, Faster, Cheaper Disk for Your Azure VMs
Hello Folks! If you have been running Premium SSD v1 because that is just what you have always done, this session from the Microsoft Azure Infra Summit 2026 is going to be a wake up call. Raymond Lui and Adam Li from the Azure Disk Storage team walked us through Premium SSD v2 (PV2 for short) and the new Instant Access Snapshots, and the punchline is simple. PV2 is faster, it is cheaper, and the operational story around it just keeps getting better. đș Watch the session: Why IT Pros Should Care If you are an infrastructure person, a SQL DBA, an SAP Basis admin, or anyone who has ever had to right-size a VM around its storage tier, this matters to you. In short, Premium SSD v2 changes the rules around how you provision block storage in Azure. Here is what stood out from the session: 4x more IOPS and 2x more throughput compared to Premium SSD v1, on a matched configuration that costs 42% less. Sub-millisecond average latency, with a top configuration of 800,000 IOPS and 20 GB/s of throughput on a single VM. Capacity, IOPS, and throughput are decoupled. You dial each one independently, in 1 GB increments, instead of buying a tiered SKU. 3,000 baseline IOPS and 125 MB/s throughput included on every disk, with no extra cost. Live Resize. You can grow disk size, IOPS, or throughput on a running VM with no restart required. Instant Access Snapshots make restores feel actually instant, with up to 10x faster hydration and 90% lower read latency during hydration. That is a lot of wins on one slide. Letâs break it down. What Premium SSD v2 Is, Technical Overview Premium SSD v2 is Azureâs purpose-built block storage for I/O-intensive enterprise workloads. Microsoft Learn describes it as designed for workloads that need sub-millisecond disk latency, high IOPS, and high throughput at a low cost. The target list is broad: SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, SAP, Cassandra, MongoDB, big data and analytics, gaming, and stateful containers running on AKS. The architectural shift that Raymond highlighted is independent scaling. With Premium SSD v1, you bought a fixed SKU. If you wanted more IOPS, you had to buy more capacity, even if you did not need it. With PV2, capacity, IOPS, and throughput are three separate dials. You provision capacity in 1 GB increments, then you set IOPS and throughput to match what your workload actually needs. If you over-provisioned, you tune it down. If you under-provisioned, you tune it up, and the VM keeps running. Raymond highlighted three primary use cases in the session: SAP workloads, including SAP application VMs, SAP HANA databases, and non-HANA databases like Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server in SAP environments. SQL Server. According to a GigaOM benchmark cited in the session, SQL Server on PV2 delivered 51% more transactions per second and 39% lower cost per transaction compared to AWS EC2, with a 9% lower 3-year TCO. Big data and analytics replacing local SSD. This one is a bit of a surprise. On D-series VMs, PV2 delivered over 1,400 MB/s of throughput compared to 720 MB/s from local SSD. That means you can run Spark or Databricks workloads on cheaper VM SKUs (without local storage) and still get more performance than you had before. Premium SSD v2 supports a 4k physical sector size by default, with 512E available for legacy applications. There are a few honest tradeoffs to know about. PV2 disks cannot be used as an OS disk, and they cannot be used with Azure Compute Gallery. PV2 also does not support host caching. For regions with availability zones, PV2 disks can only be attached to zonal VMs, so plan your VM placement accordingly. How It Works, Under the Hood Raymond covered the architecture briefly, and it is worth understanding. PV2 uses direct VM-to-storage-node communication, with 3-replica durability behind the scenes. That direct path is part of how it gets sub-millisecond latency consistently. For Instant Access Snapshots, Adam walked through the architectural difference between the classic incremental snapshot path and the new Instant Access path. With classic incremental snapshots for PV2 and Ultra Disk, the snapshot is created, then the data has to copy in the background to Standard HDD before the snapshot is usable for restore. That copy could take a while on a large disk, and restored disks would then hydrate slowly, which dragged down read latency until hydration finished. With Instant Access, the snapshot is usable the moment it exists. The data stays in the same high-performance storage as the source disk for a configurable duration (60 to 300 minutes, controlled by the InstantAccessDurationMins parameter). At the same time, Azure copies the snapshot data to Standard ZRS in the background for long-term retention. When the Instant Access window expires, the snapshot transitions to a regular incremental snapshot, sitting on cheap durable storage. You get the speed and the long-term durability without running two separate workflows. In short, your VM can boot and run at near-full performance while the data hydrates in the background. There are some limits to keep in mind. Instant Access counts toward the existing limit of three in-progress snapshots per disk, and you can create up to 15 disks concurrently from all instant access snapshots of a single disk. Real-World Value (Use Cases, ROI, Scenarios) Adam closed his portion of the session with a BCDR demo. He cloned 12 disks of an M-series production database into a recovery VM, attached them, and was immediately running roughly 500,000 IOPS at single-digit-millisecond latency. No waiting for hydration. No degraded performance window. That is a meaningful improvement to your Recovery Time Objective (RTO). A few scenarios where this combination really pays off: Pre-deployment safety nets. Take an instant access snapshot before a big upgrade. If something goes sideways, roll back in seconds instead of hours. Rapid scale-out for stateful apps. Spin up multiple disk copies of a primary instance in seconds. You can even place them across availability zones in the same region. Dev/test environment refresh. Clone production into dev or test on demand, with full performance from the first I/O. No more âweâll refresh dev next quarterâ because the restore takes too long. SAP HANA always-on operations. Live Resize means you can scale IOPS or throughput up on a running database during a load spike, without a maintenance window. Right-sizing to cut spend. If you have been paying for VM SKUs purely to get local SSD throughput, PV2 may let you drop to a smaller, cheaper VM and still hit higher numbers. One nuance came up in the live Q&A. Jens asked a great question about profiling: how do you know when PV2 is the right choice versus Standard SSD? Raymondâs guidance was direct. If the workload needs high IOPS or high throughput, PV2 is generally the right call. The VM SKU also needs to support âPremium Diskâ capability for PV2 to attach, so check that compatibility first. Getting Started Concrete first steps so you can start kicking the tires: Confirm region and zone support. Use az vm list-skus --resource-type disks --query "[?name=='PremiumV2_LRS']" to see which regions and availability zones are supported in your subscription. Pick a Premium-capable VM in a supported zone. Remember, PV2 is zonal in AZ regions. Decide on the zone before you create the VM. Provision a disk. Start with default performance (3,000 IOPS, 125 MB/s) and a small capacity. You are paying for the dials you turn up; defaults are reasonable for most starting points. Plan your v1 to v2 migration. Raymond demoed two paths. Option A: detach the disk from a running VM and convert it (the VM keeps running on its other disks). Option B: stop and deallocate the VM, then convert in place. Both preserve data, and you can raise IOPS and throughput as part of the conversion. Try Instant Access Snapshots. Add --instant-access-duration-in-minutes (or the equivalent ARM/PowerShell parameter) to your existing snapshot command. That is all the change you need to enable it. For AKS users, define a storage class with skuName: PremiumV2_LRS and let dynamic provisioning take it from there. Resources Select a disk type for Azure IaaS VMs (managed disks) Deploy a Premium SSD v2 managed disk Convert managed disks storage between different disk types Instant access snapshots for Azure managed disks Use Premium SSD v2 with VMs in an availability set Use Azure Premium SSD v2 disks on Azure Kubernetes Service Azure managed disks overview SAP HANA Azure virtual machine Premium SSD v2 storage configurations Keep Learning at the Summit Catch the full Microsoft Azure Infra Summit 2026 session playlist here Cheers! Pierre RomanJune 2025 Recap: Azure Database for PostgreSQL
Hello Azure Community, We have introduced a range of exciting new features and updates to Azure Database for PostgreSQL in June. From general availability of PG 17 to public preview of the SSD v2 storage tier for High Availability, there have been some significant feature announcements across multiple areas in the last month. Stay tuned as we dive deeper into each of these feature updates. Before that, letâs look at POSETTE 2025 highlights. POSETTE 2025 Highlights We hosted POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2025 in June! This year marked our 4th annual event featuring 45 speakers and a total of 42 talks. PostgreSQL developers, contributors, and community members came together to share insights on topics covering everything from AI-powered applications to deep dives into PostgreSQL internals. If you missed it, you can catch up by watching the POSETTE livestream sessions. If this conference sounds interesting to you and want to be part of it next year, donât forget to subscribe to POSETTE news. Feature Highlights General Availability of PostgreSQL 17 with 'In-Place' upgrade support General Availability of Online Migration Migration service support for PostgreSQL 17 Public Preview of SSD v2 High Availability New Region: Indonesia Central VS Code Extension for PostgreSQL enhancements Enhanced role management Ansible collection released for latest REST API version General Availability of PostgreSQL 17 with 'In-Place' upgrade support PostgreSQL 17 is now generally available on Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server, bringing key community innovations to your workloads. Youâll see faster vacuum operations, richer JSON processing, smarter query planning (including better join ordering and parallel execution), dynamic logical replication controls, and enhanced security & audit-logging featuresâbacked by Azureâs five-year support policy. You can easily upgrade to PostgreSQL 17 using the in-place major version upgrade feature available through the Azure portal and CLI, without changing server endpoints or reconfiguring applications. The process includes built-in validations and rollback safety to help ensure a smooth and reliable upgrade experience. For more details, read the PostgreSQL 17 release announcement blog. General Availability of Online Migration We're excited to announce that Online Migration is now generally available for the Migration service for Azure Database for PostgreSQL! Online migration minimizes downtime by keeping your source database operational during the migration process, with continuous data synchronization until cut over. This is particularly beneficial for mission-critical applications that require minimal downtime during migration. This milestone brings production-ready online migration capabilities supporting various source environments including on-premises PostgreSQL, Azure VMs, Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, and Google Cloud SQL. For detailed information about the capabilities and how to get started, visit our Migration service documentation. Migration service support for PostgreSQL 17 Building on our PostgreSQL 17 general availability announcement, the Migration service for Azure Database for PostgreSQL now fully supports PostgreSQL 17. This means you can seamlessly migrate your existing PostgreSQL instances from various source platforms to Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server running PostgreSQL 17. With this support, organizations can take advantage of the latest PostgreSQL 17 features and performance improvements while leveraging our online migration capabilities for minimal downtime transitions. The migration service maintains full compatibility with PostgreSQL 17's enhanced security features, improved query planning, and other community innovations. Public Preview of SSD v2 High Availability Weâre excited to announce the public preview High availability (HA) support for the Premium SSD v2 storage tier in Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server. This support allows you to enable Zone-Redundant HA using Premium SSD v2 during server deployments. In addition to high availability on SSDv2 you now get improved resiliency and 10 second failover times when using Premium SSD v2 with zone-redundant HA, helping customers build resilient, high-performance PostgreSQL applications with minimal overhead. This feature is particularly well-suited for mission-critical workloads, including those in financial services, real-time analytics, retail, and multi-tenant SaaS platforms. Key Benefits of Premium SSD v2: Flexible disk sizing: Scale from 32 GiB to 64 TiB in 1-GiB increments Fast failovers: Planned or unplanned failovers typically around 10 seconds Independent performance configuration: Achieve up to 80,000 IOPS and 1,200 Mbps throughput without resizing your disk. Baseline performance: Free throughput of 125 MB/s and 3,000 IOPS for disks up to 399 GiB, and 500 MB/s and 12,000 IOPS for disks 400 GiB and above at no additional cost. For more details, please refer to the Premium SSD v2 HA blog. New Region: Indonesia Central New region rollout! Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server is now available in Indonesia Central, giving customers in and around the region lower latency and data residency options. This continues our mission to bring Azure PostgreSQL closer to where you build and run your apps. For the full list of regions visit: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Regions. VS Code Extension for PostgreSQL enhancements The brand-new VS code extension for PostgreSQL launched in mid-May and has already garnered over 122K installs from the Visual Studio Marketplace! And the kickoff blog about this new IDE for PostgreSQL in VS Code has had over 150K views. This extension makes it easier for developers to seamlessly interact with PostgreSQL databases. We have been committed to make this experience better and have introduced several enhancements to improve reliability and compatibility updates. You can now have better control over service restarts and process terminations on supported operating systems. Additionally, we have added support for parsing additional connection-string formats in the âCreate Connectionâ flow, making it more flexible and user-friendly. We also resolved Entra token-fetching failures for newly created accounts, ensuring a smoother onboarding experience. On the feature front, you can now leverage Entra Security Groups and guest accounts across multiple tenants when establishing new connections, streamlining permission management in complex Entra environments. Donât forget to update to the latest version in the marketplace to take advantage of these enhancements and visit our GitHub repository to learn more about this monthâs release. If you learn best by video, these 2 videos are a great way to learn more about this new VS Code extension: POSETTE 2025: Introducing Microsoftâs VS Code Extension for PostgreSQL Demo of using VS code extension for PostgreSQL Enhanced role management With the introduction of PostgreSQL 16, a strict role hierarchy structure has been implemented. As a result, GRANT statements that were functional in PostgreSQL 11-15 may no longer work in PostgreSQL 16. We have improved the administrative flexibility and addressed this limitation in Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server across all PostgreSQL versions. Members of âazure_pg_adminâ can now manage, and access objects owned by any role that is non-restricted, giving control and permission over user-defined roles. To learn more about this improvement, please refer to our documentation on roles. Ansible collection released for latest REST API version A new version of Ansible collection for Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server is now released. Version 3.6.0 now includes the latest GA REST API features. This update introduces several enhancements, such as support for virtual endpoints, on-demand backups, system-assigned identity, storage auto-grow, and seamless switchover of read replicas to a new site (Read Replicas - Switchover), among many other improvements. To get started with using please visit flexible server Ansible collection link. Azure Postgres Learning Bytes đ Using PostgreSQL VS code extension with agent mode The VS Code extension for PostgreSQL has been trending amongst the developer community. In this month's Learning Bytes section, we want to share how to enable the extension and use GitHub Copilot to create a database in Agent Mode, add dummy data, and visualize it using the Agent Mode and VS Code extension. Step 1: Download the VS code Extension for PostgreSQL Step 2: Check GitHub Copilot and Agent mode is enabled Go to File -> Preferences -> Settings (Ctrl + ,). Search and enable "chat.agent.enabled" and "pgsql copilot.enable". Reload VS Code to apply changes. Step 3: Connect to Azure Database for PostgreSQL Use the extension to enter instance details and establish a connection. Create and view schemas under Databases -> Schemas. Step 4: Visualize and Populate Data Right-click the database to visualize schemas. Ask the agent to insert dummy data or run queries. Conclusion That's all for the June 2025 feature updates! We are dedicated to continuously improve Azure Database for PostgreSQL with every release. Stay updated with the latest updates to our features by following this link. Your feedback is important and helps us continue to improve. If you have any suggestions, ideas, or questions, weâd love to hear from you. Share your thoughts here: aka.ms/pgfeedback We look forward to bringing you even more exciting updates throughout the year, stay tuned!Upgrade performance, availability and security with new features in Azure Database for PostgreSQL
At Microsoft Build 2025 the Postgres on Azure team is announcing an exciting set of improvements and features for Azure Database for PostgreSQL. One area we are always focused on is the enterprise. This week we are delighted to announce improvements across the enterprise pillars of Performance, Availability and Security. In addition, we're improving Integration of Postgres workloads with services like ADF and Fabric. Here's a quick tour of the enterprise enhancements to Azure Database for PostgreSQL being announced this week. Performance and scale SSD v2 with HA support - Public Preview The public preview of zone-redundant high availability (HA) support for the Premium SSD v2 storage tier with Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server is now available. You can now enable High Availability with zone redundancy using Azure Premium SSD v2 when deploying flexible server, helping you achieve a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of zero for mission-critical workloads. Premium SSD v2 offers sub-millisecond latency and outstanding performance at a low cost, making it ideal for IO-intensive, enterprise-grade workloads. With this update, you can significantly boost the price-performance of your PostgreSQL deployments on Azure and improve availability with reduced downtime during HA failover. The key benefits of SSD v2 include: Flexible disk sizing from 1 GiB to 64 TiB, with 1-GiB increment support Independent performance configuration: scale up to 80,000 IOPS and 1,200 MBps throughput without needing to provision larger disks To learn more about how to upgrade and best practices, visit: Premium SSDv2 PostgreSQL 17 Major Version Upgrade â Public Preview PostgreSQL version 17 brings a host of performance improvements, including a more efficient VACUUM process, faster sequential scans via streaming IO, and optimized query execution. Now, with the public preview of in-place major version upgrades to PostgreSQL 17 there is an easier path to v17 for your existing flexible server workloads. With this release, you can upgrade from earlier versions (14, 15, or 16) to PostgreSQL 17 without the need to migrate data or change server endpoints, simplifying the upgrade process and minimizing downtime. Azureâs in-place upgrade capability offers a native, low-disruption upgrade path directly from the Azure Portal or CLI. For upgrade steps and best practices, check out our detailed blog post. Availability Long-Term Backup (LTR) for Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server - Generally Available Long-term backups are essential for organizations with regulatory, compliance, and audit-driven requirements, especially in industries like finance and healthcare. Certifications such as HIPAA often mandate data retention periods up to 10 years, far exceeding the default 35-day retention limit provided by point-in-time restore (PITR) capabilities. Long-term backup for Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server, powered by Azure Backup is now generally available. With this release, you can now benefit from: Policy-driven, one-click enablement of long-term backups Resilient data retention across Azure Storage tiers Consumption-based pricing with no egress charges Support for restoring backups well beyond community-supported PostgreSQL versions This LTR capability uses a logical backup approach based on pg_dump and pg_restore, offering a flexible, open-source format that enhances portability and ensures your data can be restored across a variety of environments including Azure VMs, on-premises, or even other cloud providers. Learn more about long term retention: Backup and restore - Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server Azure Databases for PostgreSQL flexible server Resiliency Solution accelerator When it comes to ensuring business continuity, your database infrastructure is the most critical component. In addition to product documentation, it is important to have access to opinionated solution architecture, industry-proven recommended practices, and deployable infra-as-code that you can learn and customize to ensure an automated production-ready resilient infrastructure for your data. The Azure Database for PostgreSQL Resiliency Solution Accelerator is now available, providing a set of deployable architectures to ensure business continuity, minimize downtime, and protect data integrity during planned and unplanned events. In additional to architecture and recommended practices, a customizable Terraform deployment workflow is provided. Learn more: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Resiliency Solution Accelerator Security Automatic Customer Managed Key (CMK) version updates - Generally Available Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server data is fully encrypted, supporting both Service Managed and Customer Managed encryption keys (CMK). Automatic version updates for CMK (also known as âversionless keysâ) is now generally available. This change simplifies the key lifecycle management by allowing PostgreSQL to automatically adopt new keys without needing manual updates. Combined with Azure Key Vault's auto-rotation feature this significantly reduces the management overhead of encryption key maintenance. Learn more about automatic CMK version updates. Azure confidential computing SKUs for flexible server - Public Preview Azure confidential computing enables secure sensitive and regulated data, preventing unwanted access of data in-use, by cloud providers, administrators, or external users. With the public preview of Azure confidential SKUs for Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server you can now select from a range of Confidential Computing VM sizes to run your PostgreSQL workloads in a hardware-based trusted execution environment (TEE). Azure confidential computing encrypts data in TEE, processing data in a verified environment, enabling you to securely process workloads while meeting compliance and regulatory demands. Learn more about confidential computing with the Azure Database for flexible server. Integration Entra Authentication for Azure Data Factory & Azure Synapse - Generally Available In an era of bring-your-own-device and cloud-enabled apps it is increasingly important for enterprises to maintain central control an identity-based security perimeter. With integrated Entra ID support, Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server allows you to bring your database workloads within this perimeter. But how do you securely connect to other services? Entra ID authentication is now supported in the Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse connectors for Azure Database for PostgreSQL. This feature enables seamless, secure connectivity using Service Principal (key or certificate) and both User-Assigned and System-Assigned Managed Identities, streamlining access to your data pipelines and analytics workloads. Learn more about How to Connect from Azure Data Factory and Synapse Analytics to Azure Database for PostgreSQL. Fabric Data Factory â Upsert Method & Script Activity - Generally Available The Microsoft Fabric has become to go-to data analytics platform with services and tools for every data lifecycle state. To improve customization and fine-grained control over processing of PostgreSQL data, the Upsert Method and custom Script Activity are now generally available in Fabric Data Factory when using Azure Database for PostgreSQL as a source or sink. Upsert Method enables intelligent insert-or-update logic for PostgreSQL, making it easier to handle incremental data loads and change data capture (CDC) scenarios without complex workarounds. Script Activity allows you to embed and execute your own SQL scripts directly within pipelinesâideal for advanced transformations, procedural logic, and fine-grained control over data operations. These capabilities offer enhanced flexibility for building robust, enterprise-grade data workflows, simplifying your ETL processes. Connect to VS Code from the Azure Portal - Public Preview With the exciting announcement of a revamped VS Code PostgreSQL extension preview this week, we're adding a new connection option to the Azure Portal to connect to your flexible server with VS Code, creating a more unified and efficient developer experience. Here's why it matters: One Click Connectivity: No manual connection strings or configuration needed. Faster Onboarding: Go from provisioning a database in Azure to exploring and managing it in VS Code within seconds. Integrated Workflow: Manage infrastructure and development from a single, cohesive environment. Productivity: Connect directly from the Portal to leverage VS Code extension features like query editing, result views, and schema browsing. Where to learn more The Build 2025 announcements this week are just the latest in a compelling set of features delivered by the Azure Database for PostgreSQL team and build on our latest set of monthly feature updates (see: April 2025 Recap: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server). Follow the Azure Database for PostgreSQL Blog where you'll see many of the latest updates from Build, including What's New with PostgreSQL @Build, and New Generative AI Features in Azure Database for PostgreSQL.
