Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)

Last Updated: 1/3/2023

Azure Storage Services

Azure Blobs

  • Object store
  • It can store massive amounts of data, such as text or binary data.
  • Azure Blob Storage is unstructured.
  • Includes support for big data analytics through Data Lake Storage Gen2.
  • Blob Storage can manage thousands of simultaneous uploads.

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.

Benefits

  • Durable: Redundancy ensures that your data is safe if transient hardware failures occur
  • Available: You can also opt to replicate data across data centers or geographical regions for additional protection from local catastrophes or natural disasters. Data replicated in this way remains highly available if an unexpected outage occurs.
  • Secure. All data written to an Azure storage account is encrypted by the service. Azure Storage provides you with fine-grained control over who has access to your data.
  • Scalable. Azure Storage is designed to be massively scalable to meet the data storage and performance needs of today's applications.
  • Managed. Azure handles hardware maintenance, updates, and critical issues for you.
  • Accessible:
    • Data in Azure Storage is accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS.
    • Users or client applications can access blobs via URLs
    • Microsoft provides client libraries for Azure Storage in a variety of languages, as well as a mature REST API.
    • Azure Storage supports scripting in Azure PowerShell or Azure CLI.
    • Azure portal and Azure Storage Explorer offer easy visual solutions for working with your data.

Tiers

  • To manage costs for your expanding storage needs, it's helpful to organize your data based on attributes like frequency of access and planned retention period.
  • Hot access tier:
    • Optimized for storing data that is accessed frequently
    • Example, images for your website
    • Can be set at the account level or blob level
    • Higher storage costs, but lower access and transaction costs
  • Cool access tier:
    • Optimized for data that is infrequently accessed and stored for at least 30 days.
    • Example, invoices for your customers
    • Can be set at the account level or blob level
    • Lower storage costs, but higher access and transaction costs
  • Archive access tier:
    • Appropriate for data that is rarely accessed and stored for at least 180 days.
    • Example, long-term backups
    • Can be set at the blob level
    • Lower storage costs, but higher access and transaction costs

Azure Queue

  • Store large numbers of messages
  • You can access the messages from anywhere in the world via authenticated calls using HTTP or HTTPS
  • Each individual message can be up to 64 KB in size.

Azure Disk

  • Disk storage are block-level storage volumes for use with Azure VMs.
  • Managed Virtual Disk
  • Offering greater resiliency and availability

Azure Files

  • Fully managed file shares in the cloud

Benefits

  • Fully managed: Azure file shares can be created without the need to manage hardware or an OS
  • Shared access:
    • Azure file shares support the industry standard SMB and NFS protocols,
    • Replace your on-premises file shares with Azure file shares without worrying about application compatibility.
    • SMB Azure file shares are accessible from Windows, Linux, and macOS clients
    • SMB Azure file shares can be cached on Windows Servers with Azure File Sync for fast access near where the data is being used.
    • NFS Azure Files shares are accessible from Linux or macOS clients. application compatibility.
  • Scripting and tooling:
    • PowerShell cmdlets and Azure CLI can be used to create, mount, and manage Azure file shares as part of the administration of Azure applications.
    • You can create and manage Azure file shares using Azure portal and Azure Storage Explorer.
  • Resiliency: Azure Files has been built from the ground up to always be available.
  • Familiar programmability: Applications running in Azure can access data in the share via file system I/O APIs or Azure Storage Client Libraries or the Azure Storage REST API.
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