Overview
This guide provides recommended patterns and practices for designing, implementing, and managing Azure Storage solutions. Follow these guidelines to optimize performance, reliability, security, and cost.
Performance Optimizations
Use Standard storage for general-purpose workloads and Premium storage for latency-sensitive applications. Select BlobStorage, General Purpose v2, or FileStorage based on your data type.
Move infrequently accessed data to Cool or Archive tiers to reduce costs while maintaining durability. Use lifecycle management policies to automate tier transitions.
az storage account management-policy create \
--account-name mystorage \
--policy @policy.jsonFor large uploads, use block sizes of 4 MiB–100 MiB and parallelize up to 8–16 concurrent connections.
BlobUploadOptions options = new BlobUploadOptions
{
TransferOptions = new StorageTransferOptions
{
MaximumConcurrency = 16,
MaximumTransferSize = 100 * 1024 * 1024
}
};Security Recommendations
- Enable Azure Storage encryption at rest (default).
- Use Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) for authentication wherever possible.
- Implement SAS tokens with the principle of least privilege and short expiration.
- Enable Secure Transfer Required to enforce HTTPS.
Reliability & Disaster Recovery
Employ the following strategies to achieve high availability and durability:
- Use RA-GRS (Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage) for critical data.
- Implement Azure Backup or Azure Site Recovery for additional protection.
- Leverage soft delete and immutable storage policies to guard against accidental or malicious deletions.
Cost Management
Monitor usage with Azure Monitor and set alerts for unexpected spikes. Use Azure Cost Management to review storage tier transitions and purge obsolete data.