The older storage account kind (Storage), which lacks access tiers, Archive and premium file shares and retires on 13 October 2026. Converting to ZRS requires first upgrading to GPv2, a one-way change.
Also called GPv1, Storage, GPv1.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains General-purpose v1 in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Storage account
The top-level resource in Azure Storage, giving a unique namespace for table, queue, file and blob data. Location, performance and kind are set when it is created and cannot change.
- Archive
Offline access tier for blobs, cheapest to store yet dearest to access. Reading a blob means rehydrating it first, which can take as long as 15 hours.
- Premium
Hosting plan for Azure Functions that keeps instances pre-warmed to avoid cold starts and supports VNet integration. Executions time out after 30 minutes by default, which host.json can extend.
- ZRS
Zone-redundant storage: data is written three times, each copy in a different availability zone of the same region, and nothing is replicated to a secondary region.
- FIRST
A DAX function available only inside visual calculations. It fetches the value at the start of one axis of the visual's matrix, which makes it handy for comparing each point with the first; its opposite is LAST.
- Standard general-purpose v2
A Standard storage account covering every storage service, with access tiers and all redundancy options available.
Related terms
- 3DES
Older symmetric block cipher (Triple DES) regarded today as weak. Storage customer-managed keys cannot use it as a key type.
- Access Connector for Azure Databricks
An Azure resource, provided by Microsoft, whose job is to carry a managed identity (system-assigned, user-assigned or both) that Unity Catalog can use. Storage credentials point at the connector's resource ID to gain access to ADLS.
- ADLS
Paths beginning
abfss://point into this: Azure Storage with the hierarchical namespace switched on. In Unity Catalog it is typically the object store under both external locations and managed storage. - Allow storage account key access
Storage setting which, once disabled, makes every request authorised by Shared Key fail with 403, covering account keys plus account and service SAS. Microsoft Entra identities gain nothing from it, and user delegation SAS keeps working.
- allowBlobPublicAccess
Account-level storage property; setting it to false blocks anonymous reads on all containers regardless of what each container's access level says.
- Always On availability group
High-availability feature of SQL Server that keeps synchronous or asynchronous replicas on different servers or VMs without shared storage. As every replica is a live SQL Server, it is an expensive way to provide DR.
- Amazon S3
The object storage service in Amazon's cloud. Through a OneLake shortcut, an S3 bucket's data can show up in a Microsoft Fabric lakehouse with no copy made, though such shortcuts can only be read from.
- APD
All Paths Down: every route from an ESX host to a storage device has dropped, but no PDL signal says the loss is permanent, so it may recover. HA's VM Component Protection can act on this as well as on PDL.