hanagpal explains the benefits of using zonal placement for Azure Files Premium LRS, highlighting how it improves latency and resilience for diverse Azure workloads.

Enhancing Workload Resilience with Azure Files Zonal Placement

Azure has announced the General Availability of zonal placement for Azure Files Premium LRS in select regions. Zonal placement lets you pin Azure Files storage accounts to a specific Availability Zone, offering improved control over data locality, enhanced resilience, and lower latency for applications.

What is Zonal Placement?

Zonal placement allows users to choose the exact zone in which their Azure Files Premium LRS storage account is located. By co-locating storage with compute resources, such as Virtual Machines (VMs), you can:

Reduce latency: Co-locate storage and compute in the same zone, minimizing cross-zone network latency by 10–40% for latency-sensitive workloads.
Isolate failure domains: Improve resilience by aligning compute and storage resources, limiting impact from zone outages.
Design for zone-aware high availability: Enable application-level replication and architect robust systems across zones.

Azure Files Redundancy Options

Local-Redundant Storage (LRS): Stores data within a single data center.
Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS): Replicates across multiple zones for storage-level redundancy.

Zonal placement works with both SMB and NFS shares, supporting a variety of workloads including databases, enterprise applications, DevOps tools, and line-of-business solutions on both Windows and Linux.

How to Configure Zonal Placement

Create or Update a Storage Account:
- When creating a new Azure Files Premium LRS account, select the preferred Availability Zone.
- Alternatively, update an existing account to be zone-aware.
Allocate Compute Resources in the Same Zone:
- Deploy VMs or other compute resources to the same zone as your storage account for optimal performance.

For detailed region support and configuration instructions, refer to [Zonal Placement for Azure File Shares Microsoft Learn](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/files/zonal-placement?tabs=azure-portal).

Use Case Examples

Databases: Co-locating storage and database servers in the same zone for faster access and minimal latency.
DevOps Tools: Ensuring build agents and related files reside in the same zone reduces build and deployment times.
Enterprise Platforms: Improve reliability for business-critical systems through optimized data placement.

Summary

Zonal placement for Azure Files Premium LRS empowers Azure users to:

Minimize latency by zone-aligning storage and compute resources.
Achieve better control over their application’s resilience architecture.
Build zone-aware, highly available solutions that can withstand localized outages.

For support or questions, contact azurefiles@microsoft.com.

Updated Nov 18, 2025 by hanagpal

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