What is Azure Storage?

Azure Storage is a cloud storage solution for modern applications that rely on durability, availability, and scalability to meet the needs of their customers.

Types of Data:

Ok, let us know a little about the kind of data Azure Storage Services deal with:

• Structured Data: Common examples are fixed-length data points such as social security numbers, phone numbers, and zip codes

• Semi-Structured Data: A typical example of the semi-structured data type is email, email’s native metadata lets users classify and search information with the use of additional tools.

• Unstructured Data: Examples of unstructured data includes things like video, audio, or image files

Storage Services provided by Azure

Azure provides the following storage services:

1. Blob Storage
2. Queue Storage
3. Table Storage
4. File Storage
5. Storage Account
6. Disk Storage

We will go through each storage service in this article.

Azure BLOB Storage service:

BLOB stands for Binary Large Object which is also a synonym for a file. It is designed to store any kind of files on Azure like documents, media files, or application installers. It is also referred to as Object storage. There are 3 storage tiers provided by azure for blob storage service depending on how often data is accessed while providing users better performance and pricing.

• Hot tier – data is frequently accessed under this tier like for serving images to any web application
• Cool tier – data is not frequently accessed, has lower availability and high durability
• Archive tier – data is rarely accessed like being used for storing the backup of files.

Azure Queue Storage Service

This storage service is used for storing a large number of messages (a single queue message can be up to 64 KB in size) that can be accessed from anywhere through authenticated HTTP/HTTPS calls. It is designed for scalable asynchronous processing.

Azure Table Storage

It is designed to store semi-structured data. It is used when there is no need for foreign joins, foreign keys, relationships, or any strict schema. Table storage has faster access to data and is quite scalable, even petabytes of data can be accessed within milliseconds. Similar to blob storage it also provides programming interfaces and SDKs.

Azure File Storage

It is used for storing files that can be accessed through shared drive protocols.

Azure Storage Account

All the above services are part of the Azure storage account. It is designed to store files, messages, and semi-structured data. It is highly scalable, durable, and Cheapest per GB Storage.

Azure Disk Storage

It is a kind of disk emulation on a cloud. It is persistent storage for virtual machines. It comes in different sizes, types(SSD, HDD), and performance tiers. disks can be either unmanaged disk or managed disk. An unmanaged disk means that each disk is stored as a file in blob storage. It is called so because it is not managed by the cloud provider and managed disks are managed by cloud providers.

Thanks for reading! Hope this article would have given everyone a good overview of azure storage services. This is my first article on this platform. I would be happy to get any kind of feedback or any error presented in this article.