Azure Storage Blobs: Account Overview

Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft's object storage solution for the cloud. It's optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data. This includes data for applications, content for websites, images and videos for customers, backup and restore, disaster recovery, and data for analysis.

Key Concepts

A storage account provides a unique namespace in Azure for your data. All objects that you store in Azure Storage have container names within your storage account. The namespace for a storage account is:

<storage-account-name>.blob.core.windows.net

Within a storage account, you can organize your blobs into containers. A container provides a grouping of blobs. Think of a container like a folder in a file system.

Container Naming Rules:

• Container names must start with a letter or number.
• Container names can contain only letters, numbers, and the hyphen (-).
• Container names must be between 3 and 63 characters long.
• Container names must be case-insensitive.
• Container names must not have consecutive hyphens.

Blob Types:

Azure Blob Storage supports three types of blobs:

• Block Blobs: Optimized for storing large amounts of unstructured data. They are composed of blocks. Block blobs are suitable for storing files, images, videos, and backups.
• Append Blobs: Similar to block blobs, but optimized for append operations. They are composed of blocks, but blocks must be added to the end of the blob. Append blobs are ideal for logging scenarios, like writing to a log file.
• Page Blobs: Optimized for random read and write operations. They consist of pages of up to 4 MB each, and can be up to 8 TB in size. Page blobs are used to implement IaaS virtual machine disk storage and SQL Server disk storage.

Storage Account Tiers

Azure Storage offers different access tiers to manage costs and optimize performance for your blob data:

• Hot Tier: Optimized for frequently accessed data. Provides the lowest access costs but the highest storage costs.
• Cool Tier: Optimized for infrequently accessed data. Offers lower storage costs than the hot tier, but higher access costs. Data must be stored for at least 30 days.
• Archive Tier: Optimized for rarely accessed data. Offers the lowest storage costs but the highest retrieval costs and latency. Data must be stored for at least 180 days.

Common Use Cases

• 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, restore, and disaster recovery.
• Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or hosted service.

Getting Started with Azure Storage Blobs

To start using Azure Blob Storage, you'll need to create an Azure Storage account. You can do this through the Azure portal, Azure CLI, PowerShell, or Azure SDKs.

Example: Creating a blob using Azure CLI

az storage account create \
    --name mystorageaccountname \
    --resource-group myresourcegroup \
    --location eastus \
    --sku Standard_LRS \
    --kind StorageV2
            

Once your storage account is created, you can create containers and upload blobs.

Azure Features for Blob Storage