Azure Storage Concepts

Overview

Azure Storage provides durable, highly available, and massively scalable cloud storage solutions for unstructured data, structured data, and persistent files.

The service includes four primary storage types: Blob, Queue, Table, and File. Each is optimized for specific scenarios and offers REST APIs, SDKs, and integration with other Azure services.

Blob Storage

Blob Storage is designed for storing massive amounts of unstructured data such as text or binary files.

• Block blobs: Ideal for large files and streaming.
• Append blobs: Optimized for log files.
• Page blobs: Used for virtual hard disks.

az storage blob upload --account-name MyAccount --container-name mycontainer --name file.txt --file ./file.txt

Queue Storage

Queue Storage offers reliable message queuing for communication between application components.

var queueClient = new QueueClient(connectionString, "myqueue");
await queueClient.SendMessageAsync("Hello, Azure!");

Table Storage

Table Storage provides a NoSQL key‑value store for semi‑structured data.

var tableClient = new TableClient(connectionString, "MyTable");
await tableClient.AddEntityAsync(new MyEntity{ PartitionKey="users", RowKey="001", Name="Alice"});

File Storage

File Storage delivers fully managed Windows file shares that can be mounted via SMB.

mount -t cifs //myaccount.file.core.windows.net/myshare /mnt/azure -o vers=3.0,username=myaccount,password=MYKEY,dir_mode=0777,file_mode=0777,serverino

Security

Azure Storage integrates with Azure Active Directory, role‑based access control (RBAC), and shared access signatures (SAS) to secure data.

• Encryption at rest (Microsoft managed keys or customer‑managed keys).
• Encryption in transit with HTTPS.
• Network isolation using virtual networks and private endpoints.

Pricing

Pricing is based on the storage type, redundancy option, data transfer, and operation count. Common redundancy options include LRS, ZRS, GRS, and RA‑GRS.