Understand Azure File Sync.
What is Azure File Sync in Azure, AFS for short? Well, it's, in a nutshell,
a way for you to centralize your business' file share infrastructure
without disrupting your users and applications.
So let's assume that on‑prem you have local file servers.
If we want to constrain it to Windows,
which we might as well because this Windows Server Hybrid Cloud
Administrator cert doesn't mention Linux,
at least not yet, you're sharing those files probably with
the Windows File Sharing protocol, SMB.
The idea here is that you can begin to bring the public
cloud to bear to give you various benefits,
including cloud tiering and cloud backup.
Think of OneDrive or OneDrive for Business. Understand Azure File Sync has
nothing to do with OneDrive or OneDrive for Business,
but it's a somewhat similar motif in terms of you can use your sync
group in Azure File Sync as a cloud backup repository, and there's a
feature you can enable in AFS that allows you to do cloud tiering. This
can potentially save your local file server space by offloading those
infrequently accessed files,
putting them up in Azure, and removing them from your
local file server's file system.
Multi‑site access and sync, this is a very nice value proposition where
you can advertise the same file shares in multiple locations, keep the
files in synchronization. You might be thinking,
wait a minute,
isn't that what distributed file system and, in
particular, DFSR replication is all about?
Yes.
In fact,
we can look at Azure File Sync as essentially the next
generation of DFS and directly a replacement of DFS. In the next
module, we'll go over Microsoft's suggested roadmap for moving
or migrating from DFSR to AFS.
But for now, let's just understand the service from a higher level. And then
we have BCDR, business continuity disaster recovery, being able to resurrect
a file server's contents quickly and easily.
Now, for you who are network professionals or security professionals,
you know that the Windows file sharing protocol SMB that operates on TCP port
445 is not a port that you want to open to the internet,
assuming that you're not using either a site‑to‑site VPN or an
ExpressRoute circuit into an Azure virtual network.
You should know that AFS was engineered not to use TCP 445.
We're using TCP 443 and a protocol called FileREST.
What you can do on‑prem is share entire volume roots on your local file
servers, or, more commonly, you would map your individual shared folders
with or without DFS into the Azure File Sync sync group that you'll
learn how to create momentarily.
Lastly,
you can combine Azure File Sync with Azure Backup to back up
the file shares that are in your sync groups.
This can protect your on‑premises files against something like a ransomware
attack because you would be able to restore a known good backup of those files in your Azure Recovery Services vault.