We’re excited to announce the general public preview of Azure Storage Actions, a completely managed platform that helps you automate information administration duties for Azure Blob Storage and Azure Information Lake Storage.
With exponential development in information estates, organizations face spiraling challenges with information administration. Efficient information administration is crucial for companies to totally leverage their information belongings, meet compliance rules, cut back prices, and safeguard delicate data. Right now, the instruments and strategies obtainable to handle huge information belongings are laborious, and growing useful resource investments to handle information on the identical tempo as the rise in information volumes is unsustainable. Storage clients want an environment friendly mechanism to handle 1000’s of datasets with billions of objects throughout all areas holistically and constantly.
Azure Storage Actions transforms the best way you handle huge information belongings in your object storage and information lakes, with a sooner time to worth. Its serverless infrastructure delivers a dependable platform that scales to your information administration wants, with out provisioning or managing any assets. Utilizing a no-code expertise, you’ll be able to outline the conditional logic for processing objects with out requiring any programming experience. The duties you compose can securely function on a number of datasets which have comparable necessities with only a few clicks. Monitoring overhead is minimized by way of views that summarize outcomes at a look, together with filters and drilldowns for particulars. This launch helps price optimization, information safety, rehydration from archive, tagging, and a number of other different use circumstances, with extra to observe, for Azure Blob Storage and Azure Information Lake Storage.
How Azure Storage Actions works
Utilizing Azure Storage Actions, you’ll be able to compose, validate, and deploy information administration duties in minutes. These duties could be configured to execute on a schedule or on demand.
The Azure portal interface allows you to compose a situation that identifies the blobs you wish to function on, and the operations you wish to invoke. The built-in validation expertise lets you safely confirm the situation in opposition to your manufacturing information with out executing any actions—it exhibits you which ones blobs meet the situation and the operations that will be invoked on them if the duty have been executed. Duties could be assigned to execute throughout any storage accounts in the identical Microsoft Entra ID tenant. The service mechanically provisions, scales, and optimizes the assets for recurring or one-off process executions as applicable. Mixture metrics and dashboards summarize operations visually, together with drilldowns into detailed stories that allow you to intervene minimally when and the place required.
Azure Storage Actions can be managed programmatically by way of REST APIs and the Azure SDK. It contains help for PowerShell, Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI), and Azure Useful resource Supervisor (ARM) templates.
Supported operations: The present launch contains help for built-in operations on Azure Blob Storage and Azure Information Lake Storage, together with setting time-based retention, managing authorized holds, altering tiers, managing blob expiry, setting blob tags, and deleting or undeleting blobs. Forthcoming releases will broaden help for the characteristic with extra operations.
Why use Azure Storage Actions
Automating your information administration operations utilizing Azure Storage Actions gives a number of benefits:
Boosts your productiveness by minimizing the hassle required to automate frequent information administration duties.
Minimizes overhead concerned in provisioning or managing infrastructure.
Supplies assurance with the built-in validation expertise within the no-code interface for error-free utility to your manufacturing information.
Simplifies reuse by enabling you to create a process as soon as and deploy it to any storage accounts in only a few clicks.
Encourages consistency in use of blob tags and metadata in circumstances and operations.
Instance use circumstances
Massive information lakes can have 1000’s of information units with a mixture of object sorts that require various kinds of processing. Relying on their attributes, particular person objects in a blob container might require particular retention or expiry durations, totally different tiering transitions, tagging utilizing totally different labels, and such. With Azure Storage Actions you’ll be able to outline duties that scan billions of blobs, study every blob based mostly on dozens of its properties—equivalent to file extension, naming sample, index tags, blob metadata, or system properties like creation time, content material kind, blob tier, and extra—and decide the way it ought to be processed. There are lots of recurring or one-off use circumstances that may be simplified utilizing this method, for instance:
Retention and expiry based mostly on object tags: One among our world monetary companies clients makes use of Azure Blob Storage to ingest their customer support name recordings which embrace blob tags that determine whether or not a buying and selling order was positioned, account data was up to date, and such. These recordings have totally different retention necessities based mostly on this name kind. They will now use Azure Storage Actions to outline a process that mechanically manages the retention and expiry durations of ingested recordings utilizing a mix of blob tags and creation time.
Versatile information safety in datasets: One other buyer, a number one journey companies firm, makes use of blob versioning and snapshots, however the 1000’s of datasets within the storage account have differing information safety necessities. Delicate datasets are required to take care of a stringent model historical past, whereas others don’t want such safety. Preserving in depth blob model and snapshot historical past for all datasets of their storage account is cost-prohibitive. They will now use metadata and tags with Azure Storage Actions to flexibly handle the suitable retention and lifecycle of variations and snapshots for his or her datasets.
Price optimization based mostly on naming patterns and file sorts: Many Azure Storage clients even have necessities to handle tiering, expiry and retention of blobs based mostly on path-prefix, naming conventions or file-type. These attributes could be mixed with blob properties, equivalent to dimension, creation time, final modified or final accessed occasions, entry tier, model counts, and extra to course of the objects as desired.
One-off processing of blobs at scale: Along with ongoing information administration operations, Azure Storage Actions can be used for one-off processing of billions of objects. As an illustration, you’ll be able to outline duties to rehydrate a big dataset from the archive tier, reset tags on a part of a dataset when an analytic pipeline must be restarted, initialize blob tags for a brand new or modified course of, or clean-up redundant and outdated datasets.
Getting began with Azure Storage Actions
We invite you to preview Azure Storage Actions for information administration of your object storage. You possibly can strive the characteristic without cost through the preview, paying just for transactions invoked in your storage account. Pricing data for the characteristic shall be revealed earlier than common availability. For the listing of supported areas, please see the characteristic help web page. To get began, check with the quickstart information to compose and execute your first information administration process in minutes. To be taught extra, please take a look at the documentation for particulars.
