Azure Storage Accounts
Azure Storage provides a massively scalable and secure solution for storing and accessing data objects, file shares, queues, and tables. This documentation outlines the core concepts, types, and management of Azure Storage Accounts.
Azure Storage is a modern cloud storage platform that enables developers to build highly available, resilient, and performant data storage solutions.
What are Azure Storage Accounts?
A storage account is a unique namespace in Azure for your data. Every object you store in Azure Storage has an address that includes your unique account name. For example, if your account name is mystorageaccount, then your data is accessible at https://mystorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net/.
Storage accounts provide a container for your Azure Storage data objects. All objects within a storage account are associated with that storage account.
Key Features and Benefits
- Durability: Azure Storage offers multiple redundancy options to ensure your data is protected against hardware failures and disaster events.
- Availability: Designed for high availability, ensuring your applications can access data when needed.
- Scalability: Massively scalable to handle petabytes of data and millions of requests per second.
- Security: Comprehensive security features including authentication, authorization, encryption at rest and in transit.
- Cost-Effectiveness: Various pricing tiers and options to optimize costs based on data access patterns.
Types of Azure Storage Accounts
Azure Storage offers several account types, each optimized for different scenarios. The primary types are:
| Account Type | Description | Primary Use Cases |
|---|---|---|
StorageV2 (General-purpose v2) |
The recommended general-purpose storage account. Supports blobs, files, queues, and tables. Offers the lowest transaction costs and the highest capacity. | Web-grade object storage, serving images or documents directly to a browser, storing files for distributed access, backing up data, storing logs. |
BlobStorage (Blob storage) |
Optimized for storing unstructured object data like text or binary data. Ideal for scenarios where you store large amounts of data that aren't accessed frequently. Supports block blobs and append blobs. | Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, archiving, big data analytics. |
FileStorage (File storage) |
Optimized for premium file shares that are transactional and high-performance. Based on Solid State Drives (SSDs). | Replacing on-premises file servers, lift-and-shift applications requiring shared storage. |
Storage (General-purpose v1) |
Legacy account type. Generally superseded by General-purpose v2. | Deprecated. Use StorageV2 instead. |
Core Data Services
Within a storage account, you can utilize various data services:
- Blob Storage: For object storage.
- File Storage: For managed file shares.
- Queue Storage: For reliable messaging between application components.
- Table Storage: For NoSQL key-attribute store.
Getting Started
To start using Azure Storage, you need to create a storage account. This can be done through the Azure portal, Azure CLI, PowerShell, or programmatically.
For detailed instructions on creating a storage account, refer to the Create Storage Account page.
Create Your First Storage Account