Azure Blob Storage
Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft's object storage solution for the cloud. Blob storage is optimized to store massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data.
What is Blob Storage?
Blob storage is designed for:
- 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, disaster recovery, and archiving.
- Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or hosted Azure service.
Blob storage is a **RESTful object store**. Anything that can be represented as a file can be stored in Blob Storage. You can access objects in Blob Storage via HTTP or HTTPS, and you can write libraries, tools, or applications to interact with Blob Storage from anywhere in the world.
Key Concepts
- Account: Every Azure Storage account provides a unique namespace in Azure. Your storage objects are inevitably contained within your storage account.
- Container: A container is a directory for blobs within a storage account. A storage account can contain any number of containers, and a container can contain any number of blobs.
- Blob: A blob is the simplest type of storage object. A blob can hold text or binary data.
Blob Storage offers different tiers to optimize costs based on access frequency: Hot, Cool, and Archive. Choose the tier that best suits your access patterns.
Learn more about storage tiersBlob Types
Azure Blob Storage supports three types of blobs:
- Block blobs: Optimized for storing large amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data. They are composed of blocks of data.
- Append blobs: Optimized for append operations, such as writing to log files. They are composed of blocks, but are optimized for appending.
- Page blobs: Optimized for storing random read/write operations. They are composed of pages and are typically used for virtual machine disks.
Block blobs are the most common type and are generally recommended for most scenarios. Append blobs are suitable for logging, while page blobs are used for specific scenarios like VM disks.
Getting Started with Blob Storage
You can interact with Azure Blob Storage using various methods:
- Azure Portal
- Azure CLI
- Azure PowerShell
- Azure SDKs (for .NET, Java, Python, Node.js, etc.)
- REST API
Explore the following resources to deepen your understanding and start building with Blob Storage:
- Quickstart: Upload, download, and list blobs using Azure Blob Storage
- Tutorials for Azure Blob Storage
- Azure Blob Storage Samples
Key Features
- Scalability
- Durability and Availability
- Security
- Cost-effectiveness
- Global distribution