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Understanding Azure Blob Storage Concepts

Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft's massively scalable object store for the cloud. It's designed for storing vast amounts of unstructured data such as text or binary data. This document covers the fundamental concepts you need to understand to effectively use Azure Blob Storage.

Core Components

• Storage Account: A storage account provides a unique namespace in Azure for your storage data. All objects that you add to Azure Storage are organized within your storage account.
• Container: A container is a logical grouping of blobs, similar to a directory in a file system. A storage account can contain any number of containers, and a container can contain any number of blobs.
• Blob: A blob represents any collection of binary data, such as an image, video, document, or audio file. Blob storage supports three types of blobs:
  • Block Blobs: Optimized for storing large amounts of unstructured data.
  • Append Blobs: Optimized for append operations, such as logging.
  • Page Blobs: Optimized for random read/write operations.

Key Features and Properties

Azure Blob Storage offers several features that enhance its usability and performance:

• Scalability: Designed to handle petabytes of data with high throughput and low latency.
• Durability and Availability: Provides multiple redundancy options to ensure data is safe and accessible. Options include LRS, GRS, RA-GRS, and ZRS.
• Security: Offers robust security features including authentication, authorization, encryption at rest, and encryption in transit.
• Access Tiers: Allows you to optimize costs by choosing the appropriate access tier for your data (Hot, Cool, Archive).
• Lifecycle Management: Automate policies to move data between access tiers or delete it based on rules.

Data Organization and Access

Blobs are accessed via HTTP or HTTPS. Azure Blob Storage supports REST APIs, Azure Storage Client Libraries, and Azure CLI for managing and accessing data.

A blob's address follows this pattern:

https://.blob.core.windows.net//

Common Use Cases

Blob storage is ideal for a wide range of scenarios:

• 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 by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service.