Microsoft Azure gains Availability Zones and Immutable Blobs

Microsoft has announced two more Azure availability zones and hit the red button on Immutable Storage in what must have been a breathless few days for its Azure team. Keeping the Azure lights on The West US 2 and North Europe regions have gained Azure Availability Zones as Microsoft was still reeling from the discovery that …

[Pascal Monett]

"can be created and read, but not updated or deleted"

So basically this is optical storage in The Cloud (TM).

I'm guessing there's a business case here, but I'll be damned if I can think of one.

If you cannot update the data, then you're archiving. Even on The Cloud (TM), archiving is not new. If you're making procedures available, then not updating is nonsense.

Nope. Can't think of any use. Oh well.

[RyokuMas]

Re: "can be created and read, but not updated or deleted"

It does have that feel of "here's a solution, invent a problem for it"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "can be created and read, but not updated or deleted"

Harold Shipman changed medical records in a murder spree. There's one use case. Anywhere where you can't allow changes to a document, but to *supersede it* (and keep a time-retained copy) has a use case. Financial contracts are one of these. Can't go and change the SLAs after the fact...

Am curious how this works with a GDPR subject-delete request.

[IamStillIan]

Re: "can be created and read, but not updated or deleted"

Presumably it's intended for legally required retention, and as such subject-delete request's will be refused.

[Chris Hills]

Re: "can be created and read, but not updated or deleted"

How is this different to an access control list? An administrator could surely just delete the entire pool, or are they saying they guarantee it will be there for time immemorial?

[CharliePsycho]

Re: "can be created and read, but not updated or deleted"

If there is an incident (think air crash) or security incident, then all data referring to that incident has to be put on hold so that forensic investigators can look at it. You have to prove it's been put on hold and nobody (including admins who may have caused the incident in the first place) have played with it.

[Flakk]

An Availability Zone...

...is a unique physical location in each Azure Region and is made up of one or more data centres equipped with independent power, cooling and networking.

They hope.

[CPU]

Time limited immutable data storage, seems a little oxymoron ¬_¬

[CrazyOldCatMan]

"bean-counters will be delighted to learn that there is no additional charge"

I think there's a missing "yet" on the end of that phrase..