Azure Storage Services And Types Of Storage Accounts

Each and every process will have some kind of data. Most data needs to be stored in a place where we can access it.
 
Microsoft provides storage solutions for simple web apps to most complex ML & DL Apps. Every app needs to store data in some way and apps hosted in azure are no exception but not all apps have the same needs for storing and managing information.
 
Microsoft Azure provides us with storage solutions based on our needs which we can go from unstructured data (such as files, text, images, media logs), semi-structured data (XML, CSV, JSON, etc.,), and structured data (relational database SQL in table with rows and columns).
 
We can store & retrieve any amount of data at any time from anywhere.
 

Azure Storage solutions features

 
Azure storage solutions are highly available, securable, durable, scalable, accessible, manageable and redundant.
 
We can access this storage from anywhere using HTTP or HTTPS, while all the data stored in azure is encrypted when accessed from public .
 
Azure Storage also provides us with different levels of access and security for making our data public or private, depending on the configuration that we need.
 
To use Azure Storage we must create the azure storage account, azure offers us different types of storage accounts.
  • General-purpose v1 storage accounts (GPv1).
  • General-purpose v2 storage accounts (GPv2).
  • Blob storage accounts.
  • File Storage accounts.

General-purpose v1 storage accounts (GPv1)

 
General-purpose v1 storage accounts are designed to give us access to blobs, files, queues, tables, and Azure virtual machine disks. GPv1 are the original storage accounts used on the classic deployment model. While the pricing for this type of storage account is lower, it doesn’t have the access tiers and it supports replication options (LRS, GRS, and RA-GRS)
 

General-purpose v2 storage accounts (GPv2)

 
GPv2 has all of the features offered by GPv1, but it includes features, like access tiers, and supports all replication options (LRS, GRS, RA-GRS, ZRS, GZRS (preview), RA-GZRS (preview)) that can be used with this type of account.
 
General-purposes storage accounts, v1 and v2, also offer two different performance tiers,
  • Standard and premium storage performance.
  • The premium storage performance tier is available only for Azure virtual machine disks (VHD).

Blob storage accounts

 
We can use blob storage accounts to store block or append blobs, but not page blobs. It supports a standard performance tier and has all access tiers and also supports replication options (LRS, GRS, and RA-GRS).
 

File Storage accounts

 
We can store only files in this storage account, it supports premium performance tier and doesn’t have access tiers and only supports replication option in LRS.