Azure Storage is the cloud storage solution for modern applications that rely on durability, availability, and scalability to meet the need of their customers.
The very first thing we need, to use storage in azure is a storage account.
Storage Accounts
To use any storage type in azure, we first have to create an account in Azure. After creating an account, we can transfer data to or from services in our storage account. Create a storage account to store up to 500 TB of data in the cloud. Use the Blob storage account and the hot or cool access tiers to optimize your costs based on how frequently our object data is accessed.
A storage account can be of two types:
General Purpose
Blob Storage
General Purpose Storage Account
A general-purpose storage account provides a space where, it gives us access to blobs, queues, files and tables, all of these services in a unified account. A general-purpose storage account can be used to store object data, can be used as a NoSQL data store, can be used to define and use queues for message processing, and set up file shares in the cloud.
Azure storage account 4 types of storage types in azure:
Tables
Blobs
Queues
File Storage
Tables
The Azure Table storage service stores large amounts of structured data. The service is a NoSQL datastore which accepts authenticated calls from inside and outside the Azure cloud. Azure tables are ideal for storing structured, non-relational data.
Blobs
Azure Blob storage is a service that stores unstructured data in the cloud as objects/blobs. Blob storage can store any type of text or binary data, such as a document, media file, or application installer. Blob storage is also referred to as object storage.
Queues
Azure Queue storage is a service for storing large numbers of messages that can be accessed from anywhere in the world via authenticated calls using HTTP or HTTPS. A single queue message can be up to 64 KB in size, and a queue can contain millions of messages, up to the total capacity limit of a storage account.
File Storage
A File Storage share is an SMB file share in Azure. All directories and files must be created in a parent share. An account can contain an unlimited number of shares, and a share can store an unlimited number of files, up to the 5 TB total capacity of the file share.
Blob Storage
Blob storage accounts are specialized in storing blob data and can also be used to choose an access tier, which allows you to specify how frequently data in the account is accessed. You can choose an access tier suitable for your storage and which suits your expenses.
There are three types of access tier –
Hot - This access tier grants us the lowest latency possible. Hence, it should be used with data which is frequently accessed
Cold - This access tier is less in performance than the “Hot” access tier i.e offers higher latency than the former access tier
Archine – This access tier is used to storage the data for longer retention with minimal cost.
Azure Storage Replication
We have four options in the ‘Replication’ dropdown for Azure standard storge accounts. A copy of the data is kept so that it is durable and available at high speed. It is retained even in case of hardware failure.
Locally redundant storage
A copy of the data is created in the same region where the storage account is created. There are 3 copies of each request made against the data that resides on separate domains.
Zone-redundant storage (available for blobs only)
A copy of the data is created on separate facilities either in the same region or across two regions. The advantage is that even if there is failure on one facility, the data still can be retained. Three copies of data are created. One more advantage is that data can be read from a secondary location.
Geo-redundant storage
Copy is created in a different region which means data is retained even if there is a failure in the complete region. The number of copies of data created are 6 in this case.
Read-access geo-redundant storage
This option allows readithe ng of data from a secondary location when data on the primary location is not available. The number of copies created is 6. The main advantage here is that the availability of data can be maximized.