I’ve had my Azure account for quite a while, and while I work diligently to clean up after myself – sometimes resources are just old. They have been there a while. But as Azure services are continually enhanced, there are a number of things you can do to resources; including changing their configuration and in some cases upgrading them.
I had this recently with a storage account that I have for backup data in Azure blob. I have a storage account that looks fine on the Overview page:
But if I go into the Configuration page for this storage account, there are some interesting options that I can do to change the storage account. The first is an alert, that I can upgrade this account to General Purpose v2 storage.
When a storage account is created today, Storage V2 (general purpose v2) is the default, but Storage (general purpose v1) is still an option. We can change it to V2 on the fly if I want, but what does this change? This is a fair consideration as I am using this blob account for backup data and I’m not sure if making a change on the fly will be an issue. This particular storage account is a test environment, so I am able to make a change here to see if can do this transparently.
The are warnings that this will result in billing changes and the differences between v1 and v2 are outlined here on this Docs page. Microsoft advises to use general purpose v2 accounts when possible, so that drives me to want to go through the change to ensure my use case works. And this is an important point, make sure your use case does work with the change and both v1/v2 storage. Especially if you are using different applications to leverage the Azure storage. It also is interesting to consider the change when the account is already in use versus when it is created initially. As far as I can tell, both v1 and v2 are still available worldwide in all Azure regions, but if Microsoft are advising to take v2 whenever possible – now is the time to deploy as such and ensure v1 accounts can be upgraded to v2. Here is the moment of truth for my account:
Like other Azure services, it wants you to very deliberately confirm the change and the upgrade will confirm as a task. My storage account upgrade was effectively instant. I then was able to use the storage in the exact manner as I had previously.
This upgrade went as I would expect and I was able to run my application to the service transparently. So, I’m done, right? Wrong! I need to re-run Azure Advisor to make sure that there are no recommendations that appear to this account now after the change. While Azure Advisor did not make any recommendations for this storage account, I think it is a good administrative practice to re-run Advisor recommendations after either a change or a new service is added.
Have you upgrade to v2 storage accounts? I recommend you test the process and make sure your application interacts as expected; then run Azure Advisor. Let me know any tips you have to upgrade storage accounts in the comments below.
