Microsoft updated its Azure Container Storage platform promising the trifecta of higher performance, lower latency, and improved resource efficiency for Kubernetes-based storage needs.

Azure Container Storage is a cloud-native volume management and orchestration service designed for Kubernetes. It’s designed to act as a unified block storage orchestration for Kubernetes workloads running in Azure and integrates into Microsoft’s Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to provide storage for containerized applications.

The latest 2.0.0 update is optimized to work on local NVMe drives that are typically associated with virtual machine (VM) deployments. This allows for the lower overhead of containerization that can tap into already deployed storage infrastructure, which should reduce infrastructure costs.

Containers do not include embedded storage and instead rely on external storage resources typically accessed through a container storage interface (CSI). Containerized deployments can then use Kubernetes as an orchestrator for those storage environments.

Aung Oo, VP of Azure Storage, explained in a blog post this optimization was through the rebuilding of the Azure Container Storage architecture that eliminates previous performance tiers.

“Previously, Azure Container Storage on local NVMe had three performance modes that could consume 12.5%, 25%, or 50% of your node pool’s CPU cores,” Oo wrote. “Azure Container Storage v2.0.0 no longer has performance tiers. Instead, it delivers superior performance while using fewer resources than even our previous lowest-impact setting.”

Users will continue to pay for the underlying storage uses but will no longer be charged a per-gigabyte storage fee for large data storage usage. This includes both the managed offering and the open-source version, which can be deployed on non-AKS clusters.

Microsoft is claiming a seven-times improvement in read/write input/output per second (IOPS) and a four-times reduction in latency. Microsoft plans to add integration support later this year for its Elastic SAN (storage area network) platform.

Gartner recently ranked Microsoft in the “leaders” box of its latest Magic Quadrant for container management platforms. That box included hyperscale rivals Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Alibaba Cloud, as well as more broadly focused vendors like Red Hat and SUSE.