Azure Blob Storage

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

Introduction to Blob Storage

Blob storage is designed to store data as objects in a flat namespace within a storage account. It is highly scalable and cost-effective, making it ideal for a wide range of scenarios, including:

• Serving images or documents directly to a browser.
• Storing files for distributed access.
• Streaming video and audio.
• Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archival.
• Writing to log files.
• Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or hosted Azure service.

Key Concepts

Storage Account

All Azure Storage data is organized in and accessible from a storage account. A storage account provides a unique namespace in Azure for your data. The storage account name must be unique across all of Azure.

Containers

A container is a logical grouping of blobs. Blobs within a container are not organized hierarchically, although the .NET file system interfaces may present them as such. A storage account can contain any number of containers. A container can hold any number of blobs. You can learn more about containers in the Containers section.

Blobs

A blob can be any kind of text or binary data. Blobs are also known as objects. Azure Blob Storage supports three types of blobs:

1. Block blobs: Optimized for storing large amounts of unstructured data. They are made up of blocks of data. Block blobs are ideal for storing documents, media files, backups, and application logs.
2. Append blobs: Optimized for append operations, such as writing to log files. An append blob is a collection of blocks that can only be appended to the end of the blob. Append blobs are suitable for scenarios where data is written sequentially, like logging.
3. Page blobs: Optimized for random read/write operations. They are made up of pages of data. Page blobs are used to store virtual machine disks and are suitable for IaaS applications.

For more details on different blob types, refer to the Blobs section.

Access Tiers

Blob storage offers different access tiers to optimize costs based on how frequently your data is accessed. The available tiers are:

• Hot tier: For data that is accessed frequently.
• Cool tier: For data that is accessed infrequently and stored for at least 30 days.
• Archive tier: For data that is rarely accessed and stored for at least 180 days with flexible latency requirements.

You can set the access tier at the account level, container level, or blob level. Explore the Access Tiers section for more information.

Common Operations

Common operations in Blob Storage include:

• Creating and managing containers.
• Uploading, downloading, and deleting blobs.
• Managing blob metadata and properties.
• Setting access policies and permissions.
• Copying blobs between containers or storage accounts.

The REST API documentation provides a comprehensive guide to these operations.

For practical examples and code snippets, please refer to the relevant sections in the sidebar.