Azure File Service vs Blob Storage - performance-wise

Question

I'm moving a cloud application to Azure cloud and need to decide which storage type to use. The stored files will mostly be images and occasionally a .pdf file. The only operations to be done, are basically putting and getting files, and sometimes also retrieving the metadata. By that profile, it seems that the Blob storage is more suitable for my needs.

However, I'm not sure, if using Azure File Service would give me the edge performance-wise. The throughput is supposed to be the same for both storage types.

So, I was wondering, if mounting the File Service and directly storing the files would be faster than using REST calls to communicate with a blob. And if it was, how big of a difference would that be?

I tried to look for the answer to that in this thread: Azure Blob Storage vs. File Service but it seems that the subject of performance has been omitted there.

Seif

Answer 1

Which you choose is likely going to be a combination of performance and app architecture, since some legacy apps must rely on file I/O.

From a purely performance-related perspective:

• Each blob is capable of throughput up to 60MB/sec
• Each file share is capable of throughput up to 60MB/sec

So from a throughput perspective, File shares are going to be limited compared with an entire Storage Account, since file share throughput is 60MB/sec regardless of the number of files in the share.

From a capacity perspective:

• A Storage Account provides up to 500TB
• A File share provides up to 5TB

You should look at Azure Storage scalability and performance targets here for more specifics, but TL;DR working with blobs directly will provide much greater bandwidth.

Corenda

2023 update: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/… -- Blob = greater throughput for sequential r/w. Files = greater IOPS for random r/w. – Telium

Answer 2

Correction:

Throughput (ingress + egress) for a single file share (MiB/sec) Up to storage account limits, with large file share feature enabled

Manicurist

Corrections are better suited under the comment section of the answer or the question. Please, move the correction to the proper comment section, then remove the post. – Grasmere

Answer 3

Taken from Azure Documentation (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/nfs-comparison#comparison):

Azure Blob Storage

Performance (Per volume) Up to 20,000 IOPS, up to 15 GiB/s throughput.

Azure File Service

Up to 100,000 IOPS, up to 10 GiB/s throughput.

Azure NetApp Files

Up to 460,000 IOPS, up to 4.5 GiB/s throughput per regular volume, up to 10 GiB/s throughput per large volume.

Rosmunda