Exploring Azure Blob Storage Tiers

Introduction

 
This article will help you learn the process of creating an  Azure Blob Storage account.
 
This article will cover the following.
  • Brief concepts of Blob Tiers
  • Types of Blob Tiers
  • Change tiers in Azure portal
Before reading this article, please go through some important articles mentioned below,

Azure Storage

 
Azure Storage is one of the cloud computing PaaS (Platform as a Service) services provided by the Microsoft Azure team. It provides cloud storage that is highly available, secure, durable, scalable, and redundant. It is massively scalable and elastic. It can store and process hundreds of terabytes of data or you can store the small amounts of data required for a small business website.
 
Here, we will see how to create a Storage Account.
 

Access tiers for Azure Blob Storage

 
Azure storage offers different access tiers, which allow you to store object data in the most cost-effective manner.
 
The available access tiers include,
  • Hot - Optimized for storing data that is accessed frequently.
  • Cool - Optimized for storing data that is infrequently accessed and stored for at least 30 days.
  • Archive - Optimized for storing data that is rarely accessed and stored for at least 180 days with flexible latency requirements (on the order of hours).
General Purpose v1 (GPv1) accounts don't support tiering. We have to convert our account to General Purpose v2 (GPv2) accounts if we need to perform any change the tiers
 
Hot Tier
 
When we mark the blob files as Hot it means we want these files readily accessible. The Data stored in hot tier are always readily available to use. That is read or written very often
 
Cool Tier
 
This storage tier is suitable for data that is not accessed frequently by applications. Let’s take an example of a file that summarizes your system performance once a month and stores it. These types of files you want to access once in a while.
 
Archive Tier
 
As the name indicates, this archive tier is intended to be used to store rarely accessed or archival data. Its storage rate is the cheapest on Azure, but the data retrieval charges are the highest.
 

Create the Blob Storage in Azure Portal

 
Prerequisites 
  • Microsoft Azure Account.
Follow the below steps to create an Azure Storage Account.
 
Step 1
 
Log in here. Please go through the article mentioned below for creating a Storage account mentioned below.
After creating the storage account, navigate to the blobs.
 
Exploring on Azure Blob Storage Tiers
 
Step 2 - Create Container
  
Step 3 - Create Blob
 
Here is the dashboard of Azure Blob Storage. Since this container is new, it won't yet contain any blobs. Now Select the Upload button to upload a blob to the container
  • Browse your local file system to find a file to upload as a block blob, and select Upload. And also Click on the "Advanced" tab to choose type of
Exploring on Azure Blob Storage Tiers 
    • Authentication type - Azure Storage supports authentication for the Blob services. Use shared access signatures (SAS) to grant fine-grained access to resources in your storage account
    • Blob Type – Choose your blob type
    • Block Size – Its starts from 64 KB to 100 MB
    • Upload to the folder – Here, you can upload folder.
  • Blob getting uploaded
Exploring on Azure Blob Storage Tiers
 
Step 5
  • Blob uploaded
Exploring on Azure Blob Storage Tiers
  • Blob dashboard overview - It contains the image URL, type, size etc. Copy the URL and paste it on the address tab
Exploring on Azure Blob Storage Tiers
 
Step 6
 
Click on Change tier to change the tier. We have 3 tiers: hot, cool and archive.
 
Exploring on Azure Blob Storage Tiers
 
Step 7
 
Now, change the hot tier to archive tier. While changing to archive tier, you will get a warning message telling you that the blob will be inaccessible until it is rehydrated back to a Hot or Cool tier and the process could take several hours. Click on “Save” to switch the tier.
 
Exploring on Azure Blob Storage Tiers
 
After that, we get this message:
 
Exploring on Azure Blob Storage Tiers
 
If we try to open the blob, we get this message.
 
Exploring on Azure Blob Storage Tiers
 
Output
 
Now, we change the blob tier.
 
Exploring on Azure Blob Storage Tiers
 

Summary

 
I hope you understood how to switch between Azure Blob Storage tiers in Azure Portal. Stay tuned for more Azure Storage articles.


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