Microsoft Brings Azure Managed Disks to the Python SDK

Microsoft has recently announced Azure Managed Disks support for Azure Python SDK. The company says the capability is now generally available, alongside 1000 VMs in a Scale Set. In an announcement post, Microsoft adds that the support simplifies disk management and brings better security. Azure Managed Disks brings an easier way to manage disks. This is achieved via enhanced scalability and allows developers to scale without worrying about storage limitations. For developers, this means Azure CLI works like other cross-platform solutions. Customers can use the Azure Python SDK and the azure-mgmt-compute package 0.33.0 to administer Managed Disks. In its blog post, Microsoft explains that developers have previously needed to use multiple storage accounts to maintain images for VMs. This would be a complicated way of managing a service with multiple VMs. Managed Disks remove the process of replicating images across storage accounts. Instead, it allows a single image per region and make it available for up to 10,000 VMs. Microsoft gives three examples of how new disks can be created with Python code:

• Create an empty Managed Disk
• Create a Managed Disk from Blob Storage
• Create a Managed Disk from our own Image

Virtual Machine with Azure Managed Disks

Once a managed disk is created, users are able to configure the service to create VMs from stored images. Azure Managed Disks is flexible enough to create VMs from different types of disks. Creating disks is made easier through a managed disk with no specific disk details. Microsoft says this removes the need to manage storage accounts. Another way to implicitly create a Managed Disk is by provisioning a VM from an OS images. This is achieved through the Azure Marketplace. “Managed Disks can tighten your workflow, simplify your service architecture, and offer you greater peace of mind in running a highly scalable Python cloud service,” Microsoft explains in summary. “It also offers better reliability for Availability Sets by ensuring that the disks of VMs in an Availability Set are sufficiently isolated from each other to avoid single points of failure, and offers better security via granular role based access to resources.”