Azure storage

Azure Storage is a service that you can use to store files, messages, tables, and other types of information. You can use Azure Storage on its own (for example as a file share), but developers also often use it as a store for working data. Such stores can be used by websites, mobile apps, desktop applications, and many other types of custom solutions. Azure Storage is also used by IaaS virtual machines, and PaaS cloud services.

Disk storage

Disk storage provides disks for virtual machines, applications, and other services to access and use as they need, similar to how they would in on-premises scenarios.

Disk storage allows data to be persistently stored and accessed from an attached virtual hard disk.

Typical scenarios for using disk storage are if you want to lift and shift applications that read and write data to persistent disks, or if you are storing data that is not required to be accessed from outside the virtual machine to which the disk is attached.

Containers (Blobs)

Azure Blob storage is Microsoft's object storage solution for the cloud. Blob storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data.

Blob storage is ideal for:

Serving images or documents directly to a browser.
Storing files for distributed access.
Streaming video and audio.
Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.
Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service.

Files

Azure Files enables you to set up highly available network file shares that can be accessed by using the standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. That means that multiple VMs can share the same files with both read and write access. You can also read the files using the REST interface or the storage client libraries.

You can access the files from anywhere in the world using a URL that points to the file and includes a shared access signature (SAS) token. You can generate SAS tokens; they allow specific access to a private asset for a specific amount of time.

File shares can be used for many common scenarios:

Many on-premises applications use file shares. This feature makes it easier to migrate those applications that share data to Azure. If you mount the file share to the same drive letter that the on-premises application uses, the part of your application that accesses the file share should work with minimal, if any, changes.
Configuration files can be stored on a file share and accessed from multiple VMs. Tools and utilities used by multiple developers in a group can be stored on a file share, ensuring that everybody can find them, and that they use the same version.
Diagnostic logs, metrics, and crash dumps are just three examples of data that can be written to a file share and processed or analyzed later.

Queues

The Azure Queue service is used to store and retrieve messages. Queue messages can be up to 64 KB in size, and a queue can contain millions of messages. Queues are generally used to store lists of messages to be processed asynchronously.

For example, say you want your customers to be able to upload pictures, and you want to create thumbnails for each picture. You could have your customer wait for you to create the thumbnails while uploading the pictures. An alternative would be to use a queue. When the customer finishes their upload, write a message to the queue. Then have an Azure Function retrieve the message from the queue and create the thumbnails. Each of the parts of this processing can be scaled separately, giving you more control when tuning it for your usage.

Tables

Azure Table storage 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. Common uses of Table storage include:

Storing TBs of structured data capable of serving web scale applications.
Storing datasets that don't require complex joins, foreign keys, or stored procedures and can be denormalized for fast access.
Quickly querying data using a clustered index.

You can use Table storage to store and query huge sets of structured, non-relational data, and your tables will scale as demand increases.

	Created by Cristian Osvaldo Gómez over 4 years ago

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