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Quickstart: Azure Blob Storage

This quickstart guide will walk you through the essential steps to get started with Azure Blob Storage using the Azure CLI.

What is Azure Blob Storage?

Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft's cloud object storage solution. Blob storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data. Unstructured data includes things like images, audio, video, documents, and application data.

Key scenarios for using Blob Storage include:

• 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 and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.

Prerequisites

1. An Azure Subscription: If you don't have one, create a free account before you begin.
2. Azure CLI: Install the Azure Command-Line Interface. You can find instructions for your operating system here.

Step 1: Sign in to Azure

Open your terminal or command prompt and sign in to your Azure account:

az login

Follow the instructions to authenticate your browser.

Step 2: Create a Resource Group

A resource group is a logical container into which Azure resources are deployed and managed. Create a new resource group for this quickstart:

az group create --name myResourceGroup --location eastus

Replace myResourceGroup with a unique name for your resource group and eastus with the desired Azure region.

Step 3: Create a Storage Account

Create a general-purpose v2 storage account. Storage account names must be globally unique, lowercase, and between 3 and 24 characters.

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

Replace mystorageaccountquickstart with a unique name for your storage account.

Step 4: Create a Container

Containers are used to organize blobs within a storage account. Create a blob container:

az storage container create --name mycontainer --account-name mystorageaccountquickstart --auth-mode login

Replace mycontainer with your desired container name and mystorageaccountquickstart with your storage account name.

Step 5: Upload a File

Now, let's upload a file to the container. First, create a sample text file named sample.txt in your current directory with some content.

Upload the file using the Azure CLI:

az storage blob upload --container-name mycontainer --name sample.txt --file sample.txt --account-name mystorageaccountquickstart --auth-mode login

Step 6: List Blobs

List the blobs in your container to verify the upload:

az storage blob list --container-name mycontainer --account-name mystorageaccountquickstart --auth-mode login --output table

Step 7: Download the File

Download the file from the container:

az storage blob download --container-name mycontainer --name sample.txt --file sample_downloaded.txt --account-name mystorageaccountquickstart --auth-mode login

A new file named sample_downloaded.txt will be created in your current directory. You can compare it with sample.txt to confirm the download.

Step 8: Clean up Resources

To avoid ongoing charges, delete the resource group you created. Deleting the resource group deletes all resources contained within it.

az group delete --name myResourceGroup --yes --no-wait