Azure supports 50,000 parts, zone-redundancy, and append blobs are supported in the normal "Hot" tier, which is their low-budget mechanical drive storage.
Note that both 10K and 50K parts means that you can use a single blob to store a day's worth of logs and flush every minute (1,440 parts). Conversely, hourly blobs can support flushing every second (3,600 parts). Neither support daily blobs with per-second flushing for a whole day (86,400 parts).
Typical designs involve a per-server log, per hour. So the blob path looks like:
"{account}/{path}/{year}/{month}/{day}/{hour}_{servername}.txt"
The typical workflow is to run a daily consolidation into an indexed columnstore format like Parquet, or send it off to Splunk, Log Analytics, or whatever...
(Conversely, Azure's low-level performance is woeful in comparison to AWS and they're still slow-walking the rollout of their vaguely equivalent networking and storage called Azure Boost.)
Resource Groups that actually act like folders, not just as special tags.
Resources with human-readable names instead of gibberish identifiers.
Cross-region and cross-subscription (equiv. to AWS account) views of all resources as the default, not as a special feature.
Single pane-of-glass across all products instead of separate URLs and consoles for each thing. E.g.: a VM writing to an S3 bucket dedicated to it are "far apart" from each other in AWS consoles, but the equivalent resources are directly adjacent to each other in an Azure Resource Group when viewed in its Portal.
Azure Application Insights is a genuinely good APM, and the Log Analytics workspace it uses under the hood is the consistent log collection platform across everything in Azure and even Entra ID and parts of Microsoft 365. It's not as featureful as Splunk, but the query language is up there in capability.
Azure App Service has its flaws, but it's by far the most featureful serverless web app hosting platform.
Etc...
Microsoft had the benefit of starting later and learning from Amazon's failures and successes. S3 dates from 2006.
That being said, both Microsoft and Google learned a lot, but also failed at learning different things.
GCP has a lovely global network, which makes multi-region easy. But they spent way too much time on GCE and lost the early advantage they had with Google App Engine.
Azure severely lacks in security (check out how many critical cross-tenant security vulnerabilities they've had in the past few years) and reliability (how many times have there been various outages due to a single DC in Texas failing; availability zones still aren't the default there).
Also, a 200 Gbps egress limit.
How does that compare to S3?
Mind you, at this scale the storage cost is about $15K/mo, so it would be cost effective to throw some developer time at the problem of scaling out between multiple storage accounts. Or just call support to have the soft limit cap raised…
Key points:
- It's just for the "S3 Express One Zone" bucket class, which is more expensive (16c/GB/month compared to 2.3c for S3 standard tier) and less highly available, since it lives in just one availability zone
- "With each successful append operation, you create a part of the object and each object can have up to 10,000 parts. This means you can append data to an object up to 10,000 times."
That 10,000 parts limit means this isn't quite the solution for writing log files directly to S3.