Understanding Azure Storage Services And Exploring Azure Blob Storage In Detail

Introduction

In this article, we will learn about Azure storage account services and explore Azure Blob storage in detail.

We will also be creating our first Azure storage account.

Prerequisites

Microsoft free account and Azure credits.

In this article, we will cover the following topics,

What is the purpose of Azure storage accounts
Types of Azure storage services.
Types of storage accounts
Exploring Azure Blob storage in detailed
Create your Azure storage account

Implementation

What is the purpose of Azure storage accounts

Consider an example of an application like Youtube.Users uploads images and videos on daily basis.
As an application owner where would we be storing these video and image files?
This application might be hosted on prem or an azure VM.
If it is hosted on azure VM one option would be to store these videos and Images on VM itself but this is not ideal in case the VM service goes down the video and images will not be accessible.
In this case we can levearge Azure storage acoount service.
Our application would be still hosted in Azure VM but applicaion data (Videos and images in our case) would be stored in Azure blob storage.
Blob stoarge is one of the Azure storage services.

Advantages of using azure storage account services

Using a seperate storage account service for storing application data allows decoupling between application and data.Thus if any one service goes down videos and images would still be available.
Azure storage account service is highly reliable and highly avaiable.
Azure stoarge account service is highly scalable

Types of Azure storage services

Blob storage

Blob storage is used to store object like information in our application.
As we have seem in our exmaple above we can store video ,images required by our application as a part of blob stoarge.
VM disk files on azure are also stored as blob storage.

Table storage

Table stoarge service is used to store data in table like format.
If we have application data in simple table like format so instead of storing it in appication we can use Azure table storage service.

Queue Service

If there is a commnucation needed between 2 components we can use Azure Queue service.
One component can write a message in queue and the second compoenet can read the message from queue.

File Service

File service is nothing but file shares in your storage account.You could have file shares that can be accesed by different users and different VMs.

Types of stoarge accounts

General-purpose v2 accounts- This is recommended for most secnarios.This storage account type provides the bolb file, queue and table service
General-purpose v1 accounts- This also provides the blob, file queue and table service but is the older version of this account type.
BlockBolbStorage accouns- This is specifically when you want premium performance for storing block or append blobs
FileStoage accounts -This is specifically when you want premium performance for file only storage
BlobStorage accounts- This is a legacy storage account. Use general purpose v2 account as much as possible.

Azure Blob Storage

This is one of the most commanly used Azure storage account service s
This is object storage for the cloud
Here you can store massive amounts of unstructured data on the cloud
This is highly recommended when you want to store images, documents, video and audio files
Within the blob service you create container that is used to store blob objects

There are three different types of blobs

Block blobs -This is used to store text and binary data
Append blobs -This is ideal for logging data
Page blobs -This is used to store virtual hard disk files for azure VM

Azure stoarge accounts - replication

Replication Techniques

Locally redundant storage (LRS): Here data is replicated synchronously three times within a physical location in the primary region.

Zone redundant storage (ZRS): Here data is replicated synchronusly across three azure availablity zones in the primary region.This is good when you want to have data present even in the event of a data center failure.

Geo-reundant stoarge (GRS): Here data is replicated synchronusly three times in the primary region then replicated asynchronusly to the secondary region.

Read access Geo-redundant stoarge (RA-GRS): Here data is replicated synchronusly three times in the primary region then replicated asynchronusly to the secondary region. Here the data in secondary region is also available for ready-only purposes.

Geo-Zone redundant stoarge (G7RS): Here data is replicated synchronusly across three azure availablity zones in the primary region, then replicated asynchronusly to the secondary region.

Read Access Geo zone redundant stoarge (RA-G7RS): Here data is replcated synchronously across three azure replication zones in the primary region, then replicated asynchronusly to the secondary region. Here the data in the secondary region is also aviable for read-only purposes.

Azure Storage Account Comparsion

Azure Blob Storage -Access tiers

Hot: This is optimized for storing data that is accessed frequently.This can be set at the account level.

Cool: This is optimized for storing data that is infrequently accessed and stored for at least 30 days.This can be set at the account level.

For the cool access tier the storage costs are lower than the Hot tier, but the access costs are higher than the Hot access tier.

Archive Tier: This is optimized for storing data that is rarely accessed and stored for atleast 180 days.This can be set only at blob level.

When the blob is in the archive tier, you can't access the blob.You have to rehydrate the blob first before it can be accessed.

Also the storage costs are the least when it comes to the archive access tier, but the access costs are the highest.

Creating your first storage account in Azure

Log into azure portal and search for storage account and click on create.

The account kind should be Stoarge v2.

We will select replication as locally redundant to save on cost and blob access type should be Hot.

There is no change on networking tab and select all the default configuration.

There is no change on Data protection tab and select all the default configuration.

In the Advanced tab ensure that blob public access is enabled .

Click on review and create and our deployment should be completed in around 2-3 minutes.

Once the deployment is complete we can use all the stoarge services.

Summary

In this article, we have learned the basics of Azure storage and explored more about blob storage .

We have also created our first storage account in Azure.

Thanks a lot for reading. I hope you liked this article. Please share your valuable suggestions and feedback. Write in the comment box in case you have any questions. Have a good day!