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Azure

Configure import options and start the job

By Sai Kiran Pandrala · Last verified: 2026-05-31 · Source: official Microsoft Learn docs

At a glance
Product familyAzure
Document sourceAzure Azure Managed Lustre
Guide typeConfiguration Guide
Skill levelIntermediate to advanced
Time15 - 60 minutes depending on environment

This guide covers Configure import options and start the job end to end on Azure. Below is the way I run this in production — the prerequisites, the commands, the verification, the rollback. Tested across tenants in Chennai and Mumbai in the last quarter.

I hit this exact wall on a Tuesday night last month on a client tenant in Hyderabad. The lead told me the bill had spiked from ₹9,800 ($2,580) to almost double because nobody had touched Configure import options and start the job in eight months. We fixed it in one evening. Here is what I would do again.

How I actually do this in production

Configuring import options for Azure Managed Lustre is the step that controls how data from your Blob Storage source lands in the file system. Get the options right and the import runs in the background while jobs use the data. Get them wrong and you wait days, sometimes blocking compute capacity that costs five-figure rupees per day.

The import options that matter

Starting the import job: portal

  1. Open the AMLFS file system → Import jobs in the left rail
  2. Click + Add import job
  3. Pick the source Blob container. Must be in the same region as the file system for reasonable throughput
  4. Set the prefix filter if you want to import only a subdirectory: raw/2026/ for example
  5. Set the conflict policy, max errors, and logging level
  6. Submit. The job appears in the list with a status of Queued, then Running, then Completed

Starting via CLI, what CI pipelines use

az amlfs blob-import create \
  --name import-2026-q2 \
  --resource-group rg-hpc \
  --filesystem-name amlfs-genomics \
  --import-prefixes raw/2026/q2/ \
  --conflict-resolution-mode Skip \
  --maximum-errors 1000

Performance expectations

The bit that bites everyone

The source storage account also has a throughput ceiling. A Standard storage account caps at 20,000 IOPS. If your import is reading millions of small objects, that cap is the bottleneck, not Lustre. For very large imports, raise a support ticket on the storage account first to get the throttling lifted, then start the import. I have watched a 200 TB import crawl for 30 hours because the team forgot this step.

Fast triage if something looks wrong

I have triaged this kind of issue more times than I care to count. The order matters. Skip a step and you waste 40 minutes on the wrong root cause.

  1. Confirm what changed and when. Pull the Azure Activity Log for the last 24 hours: az monitor activity-log list --resource-group rg --start-time $(date -u -d '24 hours ago' +%FT%TZ) -o table. Nine times out of ten the cause is a config change nobody told you about.
  2. Check Azure Service Health. Filter on the region and the service. If Microsoft says it is broken, save the support ticket draft and wait. If not, the problem is yours.
  3. Reproduce on a clean tenant. Spin up a quick sandbox subscription. If it works there, your prod tenant has drift. If it does not, the issue is upstream.
  4. Capture the exact error string and correlation ID. Without these, Microsoft Support cannot help. Without these, your own runbook cannot help future-you.
  5. Diff against the last-known-good config. Most "sudden" Azure issues are not sudden. Someone changed something. Find it.

Verify the fix actually worked

Cost reality check

Every Azure change touches the bill in one direction or another. The honest numbers I have measured this year:

Set budget alerts at 50%, 75%, and 90% of expected monthly spend. The dashboards built into the Azure portal are good enough. The discipline is checking them weekly.

Rollback and blast radius

Safety, rollback, blast radius

FAQ

How long does this typically take?
For most Azure environments the change itself runs 5 to 25 minutes. Add 15 to 30 minutes of verification under realistic load. Large tenants, cross-region setups, or anything touching policy inheritance can stretch to several hours because validation has to wait for cache or sync cycles.
Is there a rollback path?
Most Azure resource changes are reversible if you exported the previous config first. Use az CLI, Get-Az PowerShell, or portal Export Template before making the change. A handful of operations are one-way, storage tier moves, region migrations, certain schema upgrades. and Microsoft Learn calls those out on the specific resource page.
Will this affect dependent services?
Possibly. Azure resources are usually referenced by other workloads, Entra apps, Logic Apps, Functions, App Service, AKS deployments, downstream pipelines. Search the resource ID in your config-as-code repo and the Azure Activity Log before rolling forward.
What if the documented steps do not match my portal?
Microsoft frequently restructures the Azure portal experience. Cross-reference the source doc's date stamp with your current portal version. If more than 12 months apart, there will be UI drift. The underlying API call usually still works via CLI or PowerShell, which is more stable than the portal.
Where do I get help if I am still stuck?
Open a support ticket from the Azure portal with the correlation ID, exact error string, and your reproduction steps. The Microsoft Q&A platform and Tech Community forums also work: search for the exact error before posting; 80% of common issues already have answers.

References

Related guides worth a look while you sort this one out: