New Premium Edition for Azure Files

With Azure Premium Files, Microsoft has announced a new offer for cloud storage in Azure as a preview version. In contrast to the standard Azure Files variant, the new Premium Edition offers significantly more performance for I/O intensive workloads, that require low latency and high data throughput. For the public cloud provider, these include databases, cache storage, home directories, repositories for content and collaboration or permanent storage for containers, media and analyses. Technologically, Azure Premium Files is based on the latest generation of solid-state drives (SSDs).

The special feature of the new Premium version of Azure Files is the dynamic scaling of a data storage based to the requirements. Scaling is both, up and down with no downtime and low and constant latency.
The billing for Azure Premium Files is not based on the used storage as in the standard variant, but on the provided. However, transaction fees or additional costs for throughput or bursting are not charged.

Microsoft also provides the public preview of Azure Premium Files at Azure's data centers in Northern Europe and Western Europe.

Source: Microsoft