Azure Storage Overview

Azure offers a variety of types of storage accounts that you can choose. It all depends on the workloads that you are going to be moving in to Azure. Blobs are used to provide access to things like video and audio. It can be used to provide housing for VHDs for VMs. If you are looking to move your files into Azure then you would select the Azure Files. This is based on SMB 3.0 and can be accessed similar to the way you access your files and folders on-premises. This makes it seamless to do a lift and shift approach to implement your Azure solution. We have Queues which allow us to decouple our messaging from our applications. It helps us when we are designing ordering systems , where traffic is unpredictable. Then we have tables which are the NoSQL representation of data. Using key-valued pairs such as JSON that we have seem in previous topics. This is backed by Azure CosmoDB. Then we have Disks which are Page Blobs and are backed by SSDs and HDDs. Now when you create a storage account the name has to be unique in Azure. This is called the namespace. You will mostly be accessing the storage account using HTTP/HTTPS but you can use SMB 3.0 for the Azure Files. The storage account is very durable and is determined by the replication that is implemented on the storage account. We can go up to 16 9s in durability. The storage account is highly available and replicated to other datacenters within the Azure ecosystem. By default data that is in the storage account is encrypted using Storage Side Encryption and protected at rest. Storage accounts are massively scalable with unlimited space availability. Of course the more you pay the more you play. Now if you are using AWS you will compare this to a S3 bucket. That is the same as a storage account in Azure.

We will cover this and more in this video.