Azure Blob Storage Overview
Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft's cloud object storage solution. Blob storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data. Unstructured data includes anything that doesn't adhere to a particular data model or definition, like images, videos, audio files, documents, backups, and application data.
Key Concepts
- Blobs: The primary entity in Blob Storage. They can store text or binary data. Blobs are typically used for serving images or documents directly to a browser, storing files for direct download, storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and data archiving.
- Storage Account: A unique namespace in Azure under which all Azure Storage data objects are available. Your storage account name must be unique across all of Azure.
- Containers: A necessary part of any Azure Storage account. A container holds a set of blobs. It's similar to a directory in a file system. You can place as many blobs as will fit in the account into a container. A storage account can contain an arbitrary number of containers.
-
Access Tiers: Blob storage offers different access tiers
to optimize costs. These tiers include Hot, Cool, and Archive.
- Hot: Optimized for frequently accessed data.
- Cool: Optimized for infrequently accessed data.
- Archive: Optimized for rarely accessed data with flexible latency requirements.
Blob Types
Azure Blob Storage supports three types of blobs:
- Block Blobs: Optimized for storing large amounts of unstructured data, such as images, documents, and media files. They are composed of blocks of data. Each block can be a different size.
- Append Blobs: Similar to block blobs, but optimized for append operations, such as logging data from a virtual machine.
- Page Blobs: Optimized for storing random read/write operations. They are used to store IaaS virtual machine disks and SQL Server databases.
Use Cases
- Serving images or documents directly to a browser.
- Storing files for direct download.
- Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.
- Writing data to be processed by an on-premises or hosted service.
- Streaming video and audio.
- Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.
Note: Blob storage can be accessed via the REST API, client
libraries, or Azure tools like Azure Storage Explorer.
This documentation provides a comprehensive guide to Azure Blob Storage. Explore the sidebar to learn more about specific features and functionalities.