Storage Account Management

Managing Storage Accounts

This section covers essential operations for managing your Azure Storage accounts, including configuration, monitoring, and lifecycle management.

Key Management Tasks

• Access Control: Configuring RBAC roles and access keys.
• Configuration: Modifying account properties like performance tier, replication, and network access.
• Monitoring: Tracking metrics, logs, and alerts for health and usage.
• Cost Management: Analyzing spending and implementing cost-saving measures.
• Lifecycle Management: Automating data tiering and deletion policies.

Access Control and Permissions

Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) is the primary mechanism for managing access to storage accounts. You can assign permissions at various scopes, from the subscription level down to individual containers.

Using Access Keys

Storage account access keys provide full administrative privileges to your storage account. While convenient, they should be managed securely and rotated regularly. You can regenerate keys via the Azure portal or Azure CLI.

az storage account keys regenerate --account-name mystorageaccount --resource-group myresourcegroup --key-type storage

RBAC Roles

Common RBAC roles for storage accounts include:

• Storage Blob Data Reader: Allows read access to blob data.
• Storage Blob Data Contributor: Allows read, write, and delete access to blob data.
• Storage Account Contributor: Allows management of storage accounts but not access to data.

You can assign these roles through the Access Control (IAM) blade in the Azure portal.

Monitoring and Diagnostics

Monitoring your storage accounts is crucial for understanding performance, identifying issues, and ensuring availability.

Metrics

Azure Monitor provides a comprehensive set of metrics for storage accounts, including:

Metric Name	Description
Availability	Percentage of time the storage account was available.
Transactions	Number of successful and failed transactions.
Egress/Ingress	Data transferred in and out of the storage account.
Latency	Average time to process requests.

Diagnostic Settings

Configure diagnostic settings to send logs and metrics to Log Analytics, Azure Storage, or Event Hubs for deeper analysis and troubleshooting.

You can set up diagnostic settings in the Azure portal under the "Diagnostic settings" blade of your storage account.

Lifecycle Management

Azure Storage lifecycle management policies allow you to transition data to cooler tiers or delete it when it's no longer needed, optimizing costs.

Policy Rules

Policies are defined for individual storage accounts and can target specific blob prefixes (e.g., folders) or all blobs within a container.

Rules can specify:

• Tiering: Moving blobs from Hot to Cool or Archive tiers after a certain number of days.
• Deletion: Deleting blobs after a specified period.

Example Policy (JSON)

{
  "if-modified-since": null,
  "if-unmodified-since": null,
  "if-match": null,
  "if-none-match": null,
  "operation": "action",
  "action": {
    "type": "move",
    "daysAfterModificationGreaterThan": 30,
    "sourceAction": "delete"
  },
  "daysAfterModificationGreaterThan": 365
}

This example moves blobs to the Cool tier after 30 days and deletes them after 365 days if they haven't been modified.