What Is Azure Storage Account
Your Azure Storage Account will contain all of your blobs, files, queues, tables, and disks. Your Azure Storage assets are accessible via the unique namespace created for your account and contains all your Azure Storage data objects such as Blobs, Files, Queues, Tables and Disks. The storage account provides a unique namespace for your Azure Storage data that is accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. Data in your Azure Storage Account is durable, highly available, secure, and massively scalable.
Allow Access To Azure Storage Account Using A Shared Access Signature
The Shared Access Signature can be created to allow access over HTTP or HTTPS for a limited time to any of the Azure Storage Services. This includes Blob, File, Queue and Table Services.
You can be granular with the access you want to provide. Perhaps you have a third party that you only want to give access to your data and certain services for a fixed amount of time.
Options you can choose are
- Allowed Services
Uploading Files Via Powershell
Now that you have built an Azure environment and created a sample file lets start uploading the file to blob storage. Blob storage works differently than standard filesystems. Each file in the blob storage is an object and kept within containers.
The core functionality of blobs is similar to other filesystems, but there are use cases where either could be a better solution. Blobs can even back virtual filesystems .
Microsoft offers multiple methods to upload files to your storage accounts via PowerShell, AzCopy, and Azure Portal. But lets upload the sample file to blob storage via PowerShell for a start. PowerShell allows you a consistent experience to work with your Azure Storage Accounts.
The required actions to perform this demo will incur costs. Monitor your consumption and delete resources when you no longer intend to use them.
Run the commands below to create a new container and upload the temp.dat file as an object. The container is named demo for this example, but you can name it differently as you prefer.
# Creates a container within $storageAccount via Context property of the storage account# The returned object is then passed to the $container variable$container = New-AzStorageContainer -Name demo -Context $storageAccount.Context# Uploads the temp.dat file to the demo container # The blob name will use the same name of the file you're uploading Set-AzStorageBlobContent -File $file.Name -Container $container.Name -Blob .Name -Context $storageAccount.Context
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Azure Storage Common Factors
Both Azure Blob Storage and Azure File Storage have several different styles of storage redundancy. The available options are Locally Redundant Storage , Zone Redundant Storage , Geo-Redundant Storage , Geo-Zone-Redundant Storage , and the secondary read access versions of those, Read-Access Geo-Redundant Storage and Read-Access Geo-Zone-Redundant Storage .
The first type, Locally Redundant Storage , is a storage redundancy mechanism that replicates all data written to the storage account three times in the same primary region. This gives 99.999999999% durability to the stored objects or files in a given year. This means that if one million files or objects were stored, you would expect to lose one file or object, or have it corrupted, over a 100000 year period. However, if this single region goes down, or is destroyed, youâd lose access to all of the replicas.
The next type, Zone Redundant Storage , is an offered storage method that replicates the data across three different availability zones in that same primary region. These zones are setup so that each have independent networking, power, and cooling at their sites, and are separated by a large enough distance that a local event that affects one of the availability zones should not influence the others. This setup gives an extra 9 of durability, setting it at twelve nines of durability.
An Application Needs To Store Files In A Shared Location For Further Processing
Application 1 receives many data/files from multiple sources and stores these files in a shared location. This location needs to be in the cloud and is replacing the organizations current NAS device. Application 2 polls on this shared location, and once any files are found, initiates workflow to process these files further. The requirement is to store files in such a way that the files can be accessed from anywhere using the SMB protocol.
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What Is Azure Blob Storage Used For
Azure Blob Storage was designed to serve specific needs. If your business use case needs to store unstructured data like audio, video, images, etc then you should probably go with this option. The objects which are being stored in Blob does not necessarily have an extension.
The following points describe the use case scenarios:
- Serving images or documents directly to a browser
- Storing Files for distributed access
- Streaming video and audio
- Storing data for backup, restore, disaster recovery and archiving
- Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service
Create An Azure Files Storage Account
In this section, we will create an Azure File Storage account. We will then see how to add and mount this Azure file share in an Azure VM. First, log on to Azure Portal and click on Storage Accounts from the Azure services.
You will be presented with the Create a storage account form to fill so that storage account can be deployed. Users should fill out the form based on their subscription. The figure below has been annotated to describe each item that the user needs to fill out. Use options that will be most beneficial yet cost-effective for the business/ application.
After making all the required configuration settings for the storage account, click the Review + create button. The system will ask you to review your settings. Once reviewed, you can click on the Create button. Since I provided javacodeupload as a storage account name, Azure created this storage account, showing this name at the top of the main detail page.
Now we are ready to create the Azure File Share. Since File Share is a feature of Azure Storage, we need to log on to Storage account and click on File shares under the Data storage section.
Once under File shares, click + to deploy a new file share. Provide a share name and tier that you want to use. Once we click on Create, Azure will deploy and generate a new file share.
The details of the different Tier types are:
| Tier |
Source: Azure File Pricing
Provide the name of the directory you want to create and click on OK.
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Storage Apis Libraries And Tools
You can access resources in a storage account by any language that can make HTTP/HTTPS requests. Additionally, Azure Storage offer programming libraries for several popular languages. These libraries simplify many aspects of working with Azure Storage by handling details such as synchronous and asynchronous invocation, batching of operations, exception management, automatic retries, operational behavior, and so forth. Libraries are currently available for the following languages and platforms, with others in the pipeline:
What Is The Difference Between Blob And File Storage
The Azure Storage service is a useful cloud service that enables users to store massive amounts of data. However, there are different styles of this storage service that apply to different situations.
Azure Blob Storage is an object store used for storing vast amounts unstructured data, while Azure File Storage is a fully managed distributed file system based on the SMB protocol and looks like a typical hard drive once mounted.
Given that Azure Blob Storage is an object store and Azure File Storage is a distributed filesystem, there are several other key differences between them. One useful commonality between them though, is that they are both fully managed by Microsoft Azure, relieving that headache from its users.
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Azure Eventual Upload V2 Template
The following example shows a template modified to support Azure eventual upload.
< config version="1"> < chain template="azure-blob-storage-v2"/> < provider id="azure-blob-storage-v2" type="azure-blob-storage-v2"> < accountName> XXXXXXXX< /accountName> < accountKey> XXXXXXXX< /accountKey> < endpoint> https://< ACCOUNT_NAME> .blob.core.windows.net/< /endpoint> < containerName> < NAME> < /containerName> < /provider> < /config>
What’s in the template?
The following snippet shows the default chain that uses azure-blob-storage as the binary provider:
< config version="1"> < chain template="azure-blob-storage-v2"> < provider id="cache-fs" type="cache-fs"> < provider id="eventual" type="eventual"> < provider id="retry" type="retry"> < provider id="azure-blob-storage-v2" type="azure-blob-storage-v2"/> < /provider> < /provider> < /provider> < /chain> < /config>
For details about the cache-fs provider, see Cached Filesystem Binary Provider.For details about the eventual provider, see Eventual Binary Provider.For details about the retry provider, see Retry Binary Provider.
What Is Azure File Storage
Azure File Storage is a fully managed cloud based file service also provided by Microsoft in their Azure Cloud environments. This storage is for Structured Data, and can provide connectivity to end user devices. Think of it as a File Server that you traditionally had on-premise, that now you no longer have to manage as Microsoft has taken care of that. Folders and Files can be nested within other Folders as in the example picture below.
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Which One Is Better And When
OneDrive is a lightweight online storage with a free tier of services suitable for home use. Azure Storage is a much more durable solution with a hierarchy of service tiers. However, this comes at a price.
In order to compare MS Azure to OneDrive, we will explore several important parameters:
| OneDrive |
Microsoft Azure Storage Types Explained
Microsoft Azure Cloud offers several types of scalable and with high-availability storage. And in many cases, it is not that easy to determine the best solution for your or your clients company requirements since there are two types of storage accounts, five types of storage, four levels of redundancy, and three tiers for storing your data in Microsoft Azure.
In this article, we outline all Microsoft Azure storage types and use-cases, and also give examples.
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What Is Azure Blob Storage
Azure Blob Storage is storage provided by Microsoft in their Azure Cloud Environments. Blob Storage is for unstructured data, more importantly its an object store for storing large amounts of data. Each object is stored in a flat name space, and to the user looks as if it is stored within a directory like structure.
Upload Local Vm Files To This Folder
This section will show how to copy local files from Azure VM to the mapped Z drive, which is nothing but an Azure File share.
First, log on to the VM and pick Z: in the file explorer. We may have to log on to the mapped share, if it asks for credentials. The Azure portal also provides a script that we can use to mount the file share directly to a host. The script will check if the storage account is accessible via TCP port 445. If port 445 is available, the Azure file share will be persistently mounted.
Once in the Z: drive, create subfolders, called Documents and Index, as you would do on any Windows machine. These subfolders can also be viewed from Azure Storage Explorer.
Create some files in the D: drive of Azure VM for this test.
Copy the local files from the Azure VMs D: drive to the Azure File share location, AppFileStorage\Documents.
We can see these files copied successfully to the Azure storage container from the Azure Storage Explorer. These steps showed how easy it is to use Azure File Storage and access it from Azure Virtual Machines.
Since files are in the Azure fIle share, the Application 2 VM will also see these files, and accessing files residing on the share by Application 2 will be the same as Application 1.
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Azure Storage Best Practices To Optimize Costs & Security
There are a number of best practices for administering Azure storage systems. We have summarized the most important ones in the table below, and organized them by their main use case in three categories: Security, high availability, or cost savings.
| Azure Storage Configuration Best Practices | Primary Use Case |
|---|
Only solution with automated discovery, testing, provisioning, security, and cost management
A `single pane`for infrastructure spanning on-premise, private cloud, and multiple public clouds
A comprehensive framework that extends your existing tool investments and fills the gaps
Azure Blob Storage And Data Migration
Using the Azure Blob storage option, we can achieve the requirements stated in scenario 2. An application can receive files from multiple sources and push them to Azure blob storage using REST APIs or the application’s connector to Azure Storage. Usually, an enterprise wants to migrate data from on-prem storage to Azure Storage/ container in a cloud migration initiative. This next section will show how we can move data from on-prem NAS storage to Azure Blob Storage using azCopy.
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Whats A Use Case Example For Azure File Storage
Azure File Services is great for the following use cases
- Replacing or supplementing your on-premise File Servers
- Allowing network share access to anywhere in the world with an internet connection
- Lift and Shift your applications to the Cloud that require a network share
- Improving the resilience and uptime of your network shares
- Removing the need to patch and maitain Windows File Servers
Topics: Cloud Volumes Ontapfile Servicesaws13 Minute Read
Gone are the days when there was a need to provision raw storage inside the server for fast data access. Today, there are so many cloud storage options competing for your data, and you can mix and match storage across the different providers. When it comes to object storage, which is right for you?
In this article well give you a side by side comparison of Amazon S3 vs. Azure Blob storage services, and show you how NetApps Cloud Volumes ONTAP can work to enhance your storage options using either public cloud service.
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Unstructured Data Vs Structured Data
In order to understand Azure Blob storage, it is best to understand the term unstructured data first as it is the crux of this storage type. Note that the majority of data generated by organizations is unstructured with growing volumes. But first, lets start with MongoDBs definition of it.
Unstructured data is information that is not arranged according to a pre-set data model or schema, and therefore cannot be stored in a traditional relational database or RDBMS.
Now if you arent familiar with this space, this definition wont help much in understanding and this is completely normal. Lets take a look at it from a different perspective.
Structured data refers to data that is well organized and can be easily manipulated, the kind of data that would look good in an Excel spreadsheet. A good example is a relational database where the data gets stored in an organized way like names, birth dates, bank account numbers, you name it. SQL language can then be used to query that data.
Now, as you can see, the versus is about weighing the differences and not which one is better as they apply to completely different use cases and both are used by most organizations.
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Take A Deep Dive Into The Costs Of Microsoft Azure Cloud Storage Across Several Different Types Including Blob And Files Compare Pricing With Aws And Google Cloud
Microsoft Azure storage pricing varies according to the type of cloud storage, from Blob to Managed Disks. Within each type, there are tiers, reservations, time lengths and other cost considerations.
Customers should review all the Microsoft Azure storage pricing before making a decision. Choose the storage type and the level of performance that most closely matches the organization’s needs. Similarly, pay attention to the storage region. Compare the prices of multiple cloud providers. Finally, be aware of any extra fees that providers charge. Data egress fees, for example, can be substantial and dramatically impact the storage budget.
When To Use Azure File Storage
Azure File Storage is specifically used when storing files to be used like a managed file share. For example, if you are currently using a network share within your company on an old PC sitting under someones desk, you can move these files to the cloud using Azure File Storage, and have it act exactly the same as your current networked file share. Importantly, it supports both Server Message Block and Network File System protocols, so can be used across Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.
While a company wide network share is obviously a good use case, another very common example is when you have an existing application that you simply lift and shift onto a VM in Azure. If this application requires the use of a network share, instead of having to create a tunnel back into your office network, you can lift and shift the network share into Azure File Storage. Meaning minimal code rewrites, and making it a true lift and shift approach.
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