Azure Block Storage, also referred to as Azure Disks, is the persistent block storage for Azure Virtual Machines and a core pillar for Azure IaaS infrastructure. Azure offer unique block storage capabilities that differentiate it from other Cloud Block Storage offerings. In this talk, we will use a few of these capabilities as examples to reveal the technical designs behind and how they are tied to our XStore storage architecture.

Azure Disks provide block storage for Azure Virtual Machines and are a core pillar of the Azure IaaS platform. In this talk, we will provide an overview of Direct Drive - Azure's next-generation block storage architecture. Direct Drive forms the foundation for a new family of Azure disk offerings, starting with Ultra Disk (Azure's highest performance disks). We will describe the challenges of providing durable, highly-available, high-performance disks at cloud scale as well as the software and hardware innovations that allow us to overcome these challenges.