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Azure Managed Disks
Provides managed block volumes for Azure virtual machines
Why learn Azure Managed Disks?
Teams use Azure Managed Disks to adopt virtual block storage without building the complete underlying platform themselves.
The problem it solves
Provides persistent block devices for virtual machines and stateful workloads
Where it came from
Azure Managed Disks is Microsoft Azure's offering for virtual block storage. Its closest catalog counterparts are Amazon EBS and Google Persistent Disk; they address the same broad need but are not feature-for-feature identical.
Build your understanding
Work through these exercises in order. Try the task before opening a reference.
- Explain the main responsibility of Azure Managed Disks.
- Choose a workload that fits Azure Managed Disks.
- Identify one operational tradeoff of Azure Managed Disks.
- Compare Azure Managed Disks with Amazon EBS.
- Compare Azure Managed Disks with Google Persistent Disk.
Documentation and sources
- Microsoft Azure product catalog (azure.microsoft.com)
Connect the ideas
Alternatives
Real World Example
Streamlining Virtual Machine Storage Lifecycle
Enterprises running high-availability Linux virtual machines for internal applications.
The business problem
Manual management of storage accounts and underlying VHD files leads to operational overhead and potential data consistency issues during scaling operations.
How this topic solves it
Azure Managed Disks abstract the storage account management layer, providing block-level storage volumes that are automatically handled by the Azure platform, simplifying attachment and snapshotting processes.
- Provision a new Linux virtual machine specifying the managed disk option.
- Define the disk size and performance tier requirements within the VM configuration.
- Attach additional data disks to the virtual machine via the Azure portal or CLI.
- Utilize platform-managed snapshots to create point-in-time backups of the disks.
Shows the relationship between the compute resource and its persistent storage.
Boot volume
Application storage
- Virtual Machine → 1:1 → OS Managed Disk
- Virtual Machine → 1:N → Data Managed Disk
Expected business outcome
Reduced administrative burden and improved reliability for disk lifecycle management without manual storage account orchestration.
Limitations and checks
Managed disks are tied to the lifecycle of the virtual machine; deleting the VM may result in the deletion of attached managed disks unless explicitly configured otherwise. Check the 'Delete option' setting in the VM resource properties.