Azure Germany storage services

Important

Since August 2018, we have not been accepting new customers or deploying any new features and services into the original Microsoft Cloud Germany locations.

Based on the evolution in customers’ needs, we recently launched two new datacenter regions in Germany, offering customer data residency, full connectivity to Microsoft’s global cloud network, as well as market competitive pricing.

Additionally, on Sept 30th, 2020, we announced that the Microsoft Cloud Germany would be closing on October 29th, 2021. More details are available here: https://www.microsoft.com/cloud-platform/germany-cloud-regions.

Take advantage of the breadth of functionality, enterprise-grade security, and comprehensive features available in our new German datacenter regions by migrating today.

Storage

For details on Azure Storage and how to use it, see the Storage global documentation.

Data stored in Azure Storage is replicated to ensure high availability. For geo-redundant storage and read-access geo-redundant storage, Azure replicates data between pairing regions. For Azure Germany, these pairing regions are:

Primary region Secondary (pairing) region
Germany Central Germany Northeast
Germany Northeast Germany Central

Replication of data keeps the data within German borders. Primary and secondary regions are paired to ensure necessary distance between datacenters to ensure availability in the event of an area-wide outage or disaster. For geo-redundant, high-availability storage, select either geo-redundant storage or read-access geo-redundant storage when you're creating a storage account.

Storage Service Encryption safeguards data at rest within Azure storage accounts. When you enable that feature, Azure automatically encrypts data before persisting to storage. Data is encrypted through 256-bit AES encryption. Storage Service Encryption supports encryption of block blobs, append blobs, and page blobs.

Storage service availability by Azure Germany region

Service Germany Central Germany Northeast
Blob storage GA GA
Azure Files GA GA
Table storage GA GA
Queue storage GA GA
Hot/cool blob storage GA GA
Storage Service Encryption GA GA
Import/Export NA NA
StorSimple NA NA

Variations

The URLs for storage accounts in Azure Germany are different from those in global Azure:

Service type Global Azure Azure Germany
Blob storage *.blob.core.windows.net *.blob.core.cloudapi.de
Azure Files *.file.core.windows.net *.file.core.cloudapi.de
Queue storage *.queue.core.windows.net *.queue.core.cloudapi.de
Table storage *.table.core.windows.net *.table.core.cloudapi.de

Note

All your scripts and code need to account for the appropriate endpoints. For more information, see Configure Azure Storage connection strings.

For more information on APIs, see Cloud Storage Account Constructor.

The endpoint suffix to use in these overloads is core.cloudapi.de.

Note

If error 53 ("The network path was not found") is returned while you're mounting the file share, a firewall might be blocking the outbound port. Try mounting the file share on a virtual machine that's in the same Azure subscription as storage account.

Next steps

For supplemental information and updates, subscribe to the Azure Germany blog.