Microsoft Azure has introduced instant access support for incremental snapshots of Premium SSD v2 and Ultra Disk. Unlike standard incremental snapshots that require a full background data copy before use, instant access snapshots are immediately available upon creation. Restored disks deliver near-full performance from the start with single-digit millisecond read latencies. The feature stores data in the same high-performance storage as the source disk for a configurable duration, while simultaneously copying to Standard ZRS in the background. Key use cases include fast rollback before deployments, uninterrupted maintenance windows, rapid scale-out of stateful workloads, and refreshing dev/test environments. Enabling it requires adding a single parameter (InstantAccessDurationMins) to existing Azure CLI snapshot commands. Pricing is usage-based, covering additional storage capacity and restore operations.
