What are Azure Storage Blobs?

Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft's cloud-based object storage solution that is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data. Unstructured data includes text or binary data, such as images, videos, audio files, documents, application executables, and backup data.

You can use Blob Storage to expose files publicly to the world, or to store application data privately. Common uses for Blob Storage include:

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

Key Concepts

Getting Started

To start using Azure Blob Storage, you'll need an Azure subscription and a storage account. Here’s a basic workflow:

1. Create an Azure Storage Account: You can do this through the Azure portal, Azure CLI, or Azure PowerShell.
2. Create a Container: Within your storage account, create a container to organize your blobs.
3. Upload Blobs: Upload your files (images, documents, videos, etc.) to the container.
4. Access Blobs: Access your blobs via REST APIs, SDKs (e.g., .NET, Python, Java, Node.js), or tools like Azure Storage Explorer.

Example: Uploading a Blob (Conceptual)

Here’s a conceptual snippet of how you might upload a blob using a typical SDK:

// Assuming you have a blob client initialized:
// BlobServiceClient blobServiceClient = new BlobServiceClient(connectionString);
// BlobContainerClient containerClient = blobServiceClient.GetBlobContainerClient("my-container");

string blobName = "my-document.txt";
string filePath = "path/to/your/local/document.txt";

using (var fileStream = File.OpenRead(filePath))
{
    BlobClient blobClient = containerClient.GetBlobClient(blobName);
    blobClient.Upload(fileStream, overwrite: true);
    Console.WriteLine($"Successfully uploaded {blobName}");
}
        

Pricing and Tiers

Azure Blob Storage offers different access tiers to optimize costs based on data access frequency:

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

Pricing is based on the amount of data stored, the number of transactions, and data egress.