Cloud tiering is another advantage of the Azure File Sync service.
Here,
the value proposition is saving space on your local file
servers while at the same time not interrupting access by
your users and applications at all.
What happens is that the AFS client on your registered server creates a heat map
such that volatile hot files that are used regularly are cached locally on the
file server and cool files are offloaded to Azure.
Now you can customize the algorithm that AFS uses to
determine what files to offload to Azure.
I'll show you that in the demo.
The offloaded files are not invisible.
They will still show up in directory listings; however,
they'll show up as consuming 0 bytes on disk.
They're basically shortcuts or reparse points to the file as it exists in Azure.
And on demand, AFS will recall the file from the cloud.
You can gain additional space‑saving benefits on your local
environment's file servers by combining cloud tiering with AFS
with the data deduplication feature that's part of the Windows
Server file services feature. We'll learn more about that later in the course.