Microsoft is announcing today that Premium Blob Storage is entering public preview.
The new storage tier is said to offer about 10x less latency for average workloads and around 40x less latency for 99th percentile when compared to standard blob storage. 99th percentile can be explained as 99% of your values are less than for example 500ms.
The new premium Block Blob Storage has higher storage cost than the Standard Hot/Cold Blob Storage but lower throughput cost. This can actually make the storage cheaper for small data workloads that have very heavy amounts of transactions.
The preview is available now for US East, US East 2, US Central, US West, US West 2, North Europe, West Europe, Japan East and Southeast Asia regions.
Microsoft also plans on allowing tiered storage in the future which would allow heavily used data to be moved to hot/premium storage, and large amounts of seldom used data to cheaper cold/standard storage.
