Let's start by taking a quick look at Microsoft Azure storage services, data styles and accounts. Microsoft Azure storage is a managed service that provides durable, secure and scalable storage in the cloud. Let's break these terms down. By durable, this means that the redundancy ensures that your data is safe in the event of transient hardware failures. You can also replicate data across data centers or geographical regions for extra protection from local catastrophe or natural disaster. Data replicated in this way remains highly available in the event of an unexpected outage. In terms of security, all data written to Azure storage is encrypted by the service as your storage provides you with fine grained control over who has access to your data. When it comes to scalability, Azure storage is designed to be massively scalable to meet the data storage and performance needs of today's applications. With regards to management, Microsoft Azure handles maintenance and any critical problems for you. A single Azure subscription can host up to 200 storage accounts, each of which can hold 500 terabytes of data. Azure storage includes four types of data. There are Blobs which are massively scalable object store for text and binary data. These can include support for Azure data lake storage gentoo. Another data type is managed file shares for cloud or on premises deployments. A third type includes queues which are a messaging store for reliable messaging between application components. And there is table storage or a no sequel store for schema less storage of structured data. Note, the table storage is not covered in this lesson. All these data types in Azure storage are accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. Microsoft provides software development kits or SDK for Azure storage in various languages and arrest API. You can also visually explore your data right in the Azure portal. Azure blob storage is an object storage solution 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, including full static websites, storing files for distributed access, streaming video and audio, storing data for backup and restoration. Disaster recovery and archiving and storing data for analysis by on premises or Azure hosted service. Azure storage supports three kinds of blobs. Block blobs are used to hold text or binary files up to 5 terabytes, 50,000 blocks of 100 megabytes in size. Page blobs are used to hold random access files up to 8 terabytes in size. Finally, append blobs are made up of blocks like block blobs, but they are optimized for append operations. The primary use case for block blobs is the storage of files that are read from beginning to end, such as media files or image files for websites. And they are named block blobs because files larger than 100 megabytes must be uploaded a small blocks. These blocks are then consolidated or committed into the final blob. Page Blobs are used primarily as the backing storage for the virtual hard disks or VHDs used to provide durable discs for Azure virtual machines or Azure VMs. They are named page blobs because they provide random read write access to 512-byte pages. These blobs are frequently used for logging information from one or more sources into the same blob, and to give an example, you might write all your trace logging to the same append blob for an application running on multiple VMs. A single append blob can be up to 195 gigabyte. Next, we will explore Microsoft Azure files. Azure files enables you to set up highly available network file shares that can be accessed using the standard server message block or SMB protocol. This 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 and the storage client libraries. Finally, you can also associate a unique URL to any file to allow fine grained access to a private file for a set period. File shares can be used for many common scenarios, storing shared configuration files for VMs, tools or utilities so that everyone is using the same version. Log files such as diagnostics, metrics and crash dumps and shared data between on premises applications and Azure VMs to allow migration of apps to the cloud over a period. Let's take a look at how the Azure Queue service works. The Azure Queue service is used to store and retrieve messages. Queue messages can be up to 64 kilobytes in size and a queue can contain millions of messages. Finally, queue are used to store lists of messages to be processed asynchronously. You can use queue to loosely connect different parts of your application together. For example, we could perform image processing on the photos uploaded by our users. Perhaps we want to provide some sort of face detection or tagging capability so people can search through all the images they have stored in our service. And we could use queues to pass messages to our image processing service to let it know that new images have been uploaded and are ready for processing. This sort of architecture would allow you to develop and update each part of the service independently. Next, you will learn how to create a storage account. An Azure storage account contains all of your Azure storage data objects blobs, file shares, queues, tables and disks. The storage account provides a unique name space for your Azure storage data that's accessible from anywhere in the world over http or https. Finally, data in your storage account is durable and highly available, secure and massively scalable. Azure storage offers several types of storage accounts. Each type supports different features and has its own pricing model. Finally, make sure that you consider these differences before you create a storage account to determine the type of account that's best for your applications. Standard General Purpose v2 is the standard storage account type for blobs, file shares, queues and tables, it is recommended from most scenarios using Azure storage. And the premium storage account type is for block blobs and a pen blobs, this is recommended for scenarios with high transaction rates, scenarios that use smaller objects or those that require consistently low storage latency. Premium storage account type is for file shares only. It is recommended for enterprise or high performance scale applications. This is useful if you require both SMB and NFS, file share support. Finally, the premium storage account type is for page blobs only. If you are interested in learning more about creating storage accounts, make sure to go through the create an Azure storage account module in the learning portal.
