Azure Files

by
Andrew Snodgrass

by
Andrew Snodgrass

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

Azure Files (also known as File Storage) is an offering in the Azure Storage collection of services. It provides traditional file-sharing options using two key protocols: Server Message Block (SMB) and Network File System (NFS). The Azure Files service can be used to support Azure-hosted applications, sync with an on-premises file shares, or completely replace on-premises file shares.

Product: Azure Files

Licensing: Azure Files

Near-Term Roadmap (2026–2027)

Recent Azure Files development makes the service easier to manage and more cost-effective for large deployments:

Provisioned v2 allows customers to configure capacity, IOPS, and throughput independently, avoiding the need to purchase excess storage simply to obtain more performance. It also increases the maximum file share size to 256 TiB.

A new management model allows NFS 4.1 shares to operate as independent Azure resources, providing better workload isolation, granular cost tracking, and support for up to 10,000 shares per subscription per region.