Azure Storage Concepts

This document provides a foundational understanding of Azure Storage, Microsoft's cloud storage solution that supports data for modern applications. Azure Storage offers a highly available, secure, scalable, and redundant solution for various data needs.

Key Azure Storage Services

Azure Storage is a suite of services, each designed for specific data storage needs:

Azure Blob Storage: A massively scalable object store for unstructured data. Optimized for storing large amounts of data, such as images, videos, documents, and backups.
Azure Files: Fully managed cloud file shares that are accessible via the industry-standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol and Network File System (NFS) protocol.
Azure Queue Storage: A service that stores a large number of individual messages that can be processed by multiple applications.
Azure Table Storage: A NoSQL key-attribute store that accepts authenticated calls using HTTP or HTTPS. It's ideal for storing unstructured data.
Azure Disk Storage: High-performance, durable block storage for Azure Virtual Machines.

Core Concepts

Storage Account

A storage account provides a unique namespace in Azure for your data. Every object that you store in Azure Storage has a direct or indirect reference to a storage account. The total size and type of services available for a storage account depend on the type of storage account and its replication settings.

Data Redundancy

Azure Storage offers several options for data redundancy to protect your data against hardware failures and regional outages:

Locally Redundant Storage (LRS): Provides at least 3 copies of your data, replicated within a single data center.
Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS): Replicates your data across three Azure availability zones in the primary region.
Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS): Replicates your data to a secondary region hundreds of miles away from the primary region.
Geo-Zone-Redundant Storage (GZRS): Combines the high availability of ZRS with the disaster recovery benefits of GRS.

Access Tiers

For Blob Storage, access tiers control the cost and performance of data access. The common tiers are:

Hot Tier: For data that is accessed frequently. Higher storage costs, lower access costs.
Cool Tier: For data that is accessed infrequently. Lower storage costs, higher access costs.
Archive Tier: For data that is rarely accessed and can tolerate longer retrieval times. Lowest storage costs, highest access costs.

Data Models

Understanding the data models is crucial for using Azure Storage effectively:

Blobs:

Objects stored in Azure Blob Storage. They can be of any size and type. Blobs are organized into containers.

Files:

Can be accessed by multiple virtual machines concurrently, or by on-premises applications. Uses standard file system semantics.

Queues:

Messages are stored in a queue. Applications can add messages to the queue, and other applications can retrieve messages from the queue to process them.

Tables:

A NoSQL datastore that stores structured non-relational data. Each table contains entities, and each entity contains properties.

Security Features

Azure Storage provides robust security features, including:

Authentication and Authorization: Shared Key, Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), and Shared Access Signatures (SAS).
Encryption: Data is automatically encrypted at rest. Support for customer-managed keys.
Network Security: Firewalls, virtual networks, and private endpoints.
Data Protection: Versioning, soft delete, and point-in-time restore for blobs.

Note: Always choose the appropriate storage service and redundancy option based on your application's requirements for availability, performance, and cost.

Next Steps

Explore the following resources to deepen your understanding: