Overview of Azure Storage

Last updated: October 26, 2023

Azure Storage is a cloud storage solution that is highly available, secure, scalable, and redundant. It offers a range of services for storing and accessing data, designed to meet various application needs.

Note: Azure Storage provides highly available, disaster-resistant, scalable cloud storage. It is designed for modern applications that rely on durability and availability.

Key Services in Azure Storage

Azure Storage offers several distinct services, each optimized for different use cases:

Blob Storage

Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft's object storage solution for the cloud. Blob storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data. Unstructured data is data that doesn’t adhere to a particular data model or definition, such as images, audio, video, configuration files, or executable files.

  • Store and serve images and documents directly to a browser.
  • Store files for direct download.
  • Store data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and data archiving.
  • Stream video and audio.
  • Write to log files.
  • Store data for training machine learning models.

Learn more about Azure Blob Storage.

File Storage

Azure File Storage offers fully managed cloud file shares that are accessible via the industry-standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. You can mount Azure File shares simultaneously from cloud or on-premises deployments of Windows, Linux, and macOS. Azure Files is a world-class cloud file service. The Azure File sync feature allows you to centralize your organization’s file shares in Azure Files while keeping file servers on-premises for local access.

  • Replace on-premises file servers.
  • Lift-and-shift applications that rely on shared file systems.
  • Provide shared storage for applications.

Learn more about Azure File Storage.

Queue Storage

Azure Queue Storage is a service that stores large numbers of messages that can be processed asynchronously. Each message in a queue is typically up to 64 KB in size. Queue storage is used to store one or more messages to be processed at a later time.

  • Build applications that require asynchronous processing of tasks.
  • Decouple application components.
  • Manage workflows.

Learn more about Azure Queue Storage.

Table Storage

Azure Table Storage is a NoSQL key-attribute store that holds unstructured data. It's a great solution for storing large amounts of sparse data that requires a key-value lookup. It's much cheaper and more efficient than SQL databases for many common web application scenarios.

  • Store and query flexible datasets.
  • Store data that doesn't require complex joins or transactions.
  • Manage user profiles, device data, or metadata.

Learn more about Azure Table Storage.

Tip: Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is a set of capabilities dedicated to big data analytics, built on Azure Blob Storage. It provides a massively scalable and cost-effective data lake solution.

Core Concepts

Understanding these core concepts will help you work effectively with Azure Storage:

  • Storage Account: A storage account provides a unique namespace in Azure for your storage data. Every object that you store in Azure Storage has a direct or indirect path that includes the name of your storage account.
  • Data Redundancy: Azure Storage offers several options for data redundancy to protect your data against hardware failures and regional disasters. These include LRS (Locally-redundant storage), ZRS (Zone-redundant storage), GRS (Geo-redundant storage), and RA-GRS (Read-access geo-redundant storage).
  • Access Tiers: Blob Storage offers access tiers (Hot, Cool, and Archive) to optimize costs based on data access frequency.

Getting Started

To start using Azure Storage, you'll need an Azure subscription and a storage account. You can create these through the Azure portal, Azure CLI, or Azure PowerShell.

Here's a simple example of how to create a storage account using Azure CLI:

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

For more detailed instructions and code samples, please refer to the specific service documentation.

Important: Always use Azure RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) and Shared Access Signatures (SAS) to secure your storage resources and grant least privilege access.