Microsoft has introduced instant access support for incremental snapshots of Premium SSD v2 (Pv2) and Ultra Disk on Azure. The Redmond giant says that this provides an “industry-leading snapshot experience” where organizations can perform snapshot creation and disk restore instantly. Instant access snapshots are usable immediately after creation and deliver near-full performance straight away, allowing applications to resume immediately.
Until now, incremental snapshots have given organizations a cost-effective way to protect their data and create point-in-time disk copies for their workflows. However, these have several issues such as data needing to be fully copied before snapshots can restore disks and disks needing to be fully hydrated to reach peak performance. The new instant access snapshots remove these bottlenecks.
Aside from instant availability and fast restore, instant access snapshots also offer incremental storage and cross-zonal restore. With incremental storage, instant snapshots only store the incremental changes made to the source disk after snapshot creation, removing the need for a full base snapshot. This helps to keep storage costs down. Meanwhile, cross-zonal restore allows you to restore disks into a different availability zone within the same region, boosting flexibility for deployment and recovery.
The rollout of instant access snapshots will enable a number of use cases that organizations can take advantage of. One way in which organizations will benefit is with faster rollbacks. Before deploying big software upgrades, you can use instant access snapshots to create a recovery point and then rollback to it if issues occur. Additionally, when you create a snapshot, you do not need to wait for them to become ready, reducing application downtime.
This new feature also enables rapid scale-out and spinning up secondary environments quicker. On the first point of rapid scale-out, instant access snapshots allow you to scale stateful applications by creating multiple disk copies of your primary instance in seconds. You can also create copies across availability zones within the same region to make them more resilient. As for the second point, instant access snapshots let you copy production disks and spin up secondary environments for development and testing quickly. This ensures your test environment is always in sync with production and delivers high performance from the get go.
Instant access support is available for Pv2 and Ultra Disk in all Azure regions where these disk types are supported. It uses a usage-based billing model that charges only for the additional storage capacity consumed and for each restore operation. You can read more about pricing on the Managed Disk Pricing page and learn more in the dedicated documentation.