Microsoft has announced several enhancements for Azure Disks at their Microsoft Ignite Conference held last November. Here is a quick rundown.

Bursting Enhancements

Azure Disks now support new 4, 8, and 16 GB sizes on Premium SSD and Standard SSD. Applicable Premium SSD disks can now burst up to 30x of the provisioned performance target, providing better tolerance for spiky workloads.

Bursting is beneficial on some of the following scenarios

• To boot the Virtual Machine and its OS faster
• Hosting a Remote Virtual Desktop and requires additional burst capacity when launching applications that requires the application to run faster

If your current disk does not yet support bursting, you can do either of the following:

• Detach and reattach the disk
• Stop and start the VM

Server-side encryption (SSE) with customer-managed keys (CMK)

SSE with CMK enables customers to leverage Azure Key Vault as the highly available and scalable repository for their Azure Disk encryption keys.

Incremental Snapshots

Azure Managed Disks now offers incremental snapshots, which allow for cost-effective point-in-time backups of Azure Disks.

Incremental snapshots provide a differential capability, a unique capability available only in Azure managed disks. It enables customers and independent solution vendors (ISV) to build backup and disaster recovery solutions for managed disks. It allows you to get the changes between two snapshots of the same disk, thus copying only changed data between two snapshots across regions, reducing time and cost for backup and disaster recovery

It also now supports direct upload to copy a VHD from on-premises or backup location directly as a Managed Disk