AZ-104 Certification Notes

Chapter 8.4 - Performance Tiers

Performance Tiers (Blob Storage)

There are 2 types of performance tiers for storage accounts: Standard and Premium. IOPS stands for Input/Output Operations Per Second. The higher the IOPS the faster a drive can read and write.

• Premium Performance

  • Stored on Solid State Drives (SSDs)
  • Optimize for low-latency
  • Higher throughput
  • Use cases:
    • Interactive workloads
    • Analytics
    • AI or ML
    • Data transformation An SSD has no moving parts and data is distributed randomly. This is why it can read and write so fast.

• Standard Performance

  • Stored on Hard Disk Drives (HDDs)
  • Varied performance based on access tier (Hot, Cool, Archive)
  • Use cases:
    • Backup and disaster recovery
    • Media content
    • Bulk data processing A HDD has moving parts, an arm that needs to read and write data sequential to a disk. It's very good at writing or reading large amounts of data that is close together.

Practice Quiz

• An SSD has ___ and data is distributed randomly. This is why it can read and write so fast.

  • moving parts
  • small parts
  • large parts
  • no moving parts

• IOPS stands for Input/Output Operations Per Second. The higher the IOPS the faster a drive can read and write.

  • False
  • True

• Which Performance Tier stores data on SSDs, optimizes for low-latency, has higher throughput, etc?

  • Premium Performance
  • Standard Performance
  • Full Performance
  • Minimum Performance

• Which performance tier for storage accounts is stored on HDDs, and has varied performance based on access tier (Hot, Cool, Archive)?

  • Standard Performance