Azure Storage Documentation

Overview

Azure Storage is Microsoft's cloud-based storage solution. It's designed to be highly scalable, durable, and available. It offers a variety of services to meet different storage needs, from object storage to file shares and queues.

Core Services

On this page:

Blob Storage

Azure Blob Storage is an object storage solution for the cloud. It's optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data.

  • Use Cases: Storing images, documents, application assets, backups, big data analytics.
  • Access Tiers: Hot, Cool, and Archive for optimizing costs based on access frequency.
  • Key Features: Scalability, REST API access, SDKs for various languages, tiered storage.

Learn more about Blob Storage.

File Storage

Azure Files offers fully managed cloud file shares that are accessible via the industry-standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol or Network File System (NFS) protocol.

  • Use Cases: Lift-and-shift applications, shared configuration files, development/testing environments.
  • Mounting: Can be mounted concurrently by cloud or on-premises Windows, macOS, and Linux deployments.
  • Key Features: SMB/NFS access, managed service, integration with on-premises file servers (Azure File Sync).

Explore Azure Files.

Queue Storage

Azure Queue Storage is a service that stores large numbers of messages that can be accessed from anywhere in the world via authenticated HTTP or HTTPS.

  • Use Cases: Decoupling application components, asynchronous task processing, building reliable message-driven applications.
  • Message Handling: Messages can be up to 64 KB in size, and a queue can contain millions of messages.
  • Key Features: Asynchronous communication, durability, scalability.

Understand Queue Storage.

Table Storage

Azure Table Storage is a NoSQL key-attribute store that accepts authenticated calls using HTTP or HTTPS, from anywhere in the world. A single storage account can contain thousands of tables, an extremely large number of entities, and a huge total amount of data.

  • Use Cases: Storing large amounts of structured NoSQL data, user data, device information.
  • Schema-less: Entities within the same table don't need to have the same set of properties.
  • Key Features: Scalable, fast key-based access, cost-effective for large datasets.

Discover Table Storage.

Disks

Azure Managed Disks are block-level storage volumes that are managed by Azure and used for encrypting data at rest with platform-managed or customer-managed keys. They are used with Azure Virtual Machines.

  • Types: Ultra Disk, Premium SSD, Standard SSD, Standard HDD.
  • High Performance: Available for I/O-intensive workloads.
  • Durability: Designed for high availability and durability.

Learn about Managed Disks.

Key Concepts

Storage Accounts

A storage account provides a unique namespace in Azure for your data object. Every object you store in Azure Storage has an address that includes your unique account name.

There are different types of storage accounts, including:

Type Description
General-purpose v2 (GPv2) Recommended for most scenarios, supports blobs, files, queues, and tables.
Blob storage Optimized for storing blobs.
File storage Optimized for storing Azure Files shares.
BlockBlobStorage Optimized for block blobs with high transaction rates or low latency.

Data Redundancy

Azure Storage offers several options for data redundancy to ensure durability and availability:

  • Locally-redundant storage (LRS): Replicates data synchronously three times within a single physical location.
  • Zone-redundant storage (ZRS): Replicates data synchronously across three Azure availability zones in the same region.
  • Geo-redundant storage (GRS): Replicates data synchronously across two physical locations within a region and asynchronously to a secondary region.
  • Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS): Combines zone-redundant storage (ZRS) in the primary region with geo-redundant storage (GRS) to provide maximum durability.

Access Management

Azure Storage provides robust access management capabilities, including:

  • Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): For managing permissions to storage accounts and resources.
  • Shared Access Signatures (SAS): For granting time-limited, granular access to specific resources.
  • Access Keys: For full administrative access to a storage account.

Getting Started

You can start using Azure Storage through various methods:

  • Azure Portal: A web-based interface for managing your storage resources.
  • Azure CLI: A cross-platform command-line tool.
  • Azure PowerShell: A scripting environment for managing Azure resources.
  • SDKs: Client libraries for popular programming languages (e.g., .NET, Java, Python, Node.js).

Example using Azure CLI to create a storage account:


az storage account create \
    --name mystorageaccountname \
    --resource-group myResourceGroup \
    --location eastus \
    --sku Standard_LRS