Data storage plays a crucial role in the success of digital platforms. But it is a challenge for businesses to store their data and protect it while also making it accessible to authorized users.
As digital processes become more demanding for exponentially larger data volumes, traditional data storage and management methods are rendered ineffective. Moreover, high-tech websites and applications need sophisticated systems to store and manage enormous data packets without the risk of breach or damage.
When your databases are no longer the best option, you could try a relatively low-cost, high-security alternative.
It’s called cloud storage, a massive industry. And it is also a lot less expensive than managed databases, accommodating a wide variety of application architectures. The global cloud storage market/azure marketplace is expected to expand to USD 137.3 billion by 2025, at a yearly rate of 23%. This only proves that many organizations are getting wiser about the impact cloud can have on their processes.
Out of all the cloud services storage options available to you, Microsoft Azure is the most viable as it has many data storage options for web and app developers.
To learn more about microsoft Azure’s storage & cloud computing platform, let’s dive into the basics and find the best way to leverage Azure services.
What Is Azure Storage?
Azure’s storage is an integral part of Microsoft’s cloud storage, offering contemporary object data storage solutions. Azure is an ascendable store for data objects, and it also provides a wide array of usability options.
You could consider it a file system service for cloud storage, a messaging store for reliable communication, and a NoSQL store for data storage and retrieval. All in all, Microsoft Azure’s Storage offers scalability, durability, accessibility, and easy management.
Its high availability, reliability, and flexibility make it perfect for people handling big data and analytics. Whether it’s audio, video, images, configuration files, sensor data, or any other form of information, Azure can save it all and make it accessible for you anywhere.
Types Of Azure Storage Accounts
The Azure’s storage account serves as an access point to all the features that make up the azure’s storage cloud. In order to avail of the Azure app service, you need to create an account and choose the level of resilience you require. The rest will be taken care of.
A single account can store around 500 TB of data, which is beyond any other data storage. You can get the following types of azure services accounts:
Standard
Includes blob, queue, table, and file storage capabilities. This type is recommended for most scenarios.
Premium Block
If you want premium performance from the block and append blobs, this is the account for you. We suggest you opt for it if you often deal with high transaction rates, use smaller objects or require low latency for your storage.
Premium File Share
This type of account also offers superior performance but only for files. Suggested for enterprise use or high-scale applications.
Premium Page Blob
If you only use page blob and need premium high-speed storage, this one’s it.
Resources Offered With Azure’s Storage
This is where we explain some of the terms used above. There are four ways to use your Microsoft Azure’s storage:
Blob Storage
It serves as storage for unstructured data such as text or binary data. In fact, it is a massively scalable object-store.
Queue Storage
It is a messaging queue storage and stores millions of messages between the application mechanisms. These messages can be text strings or data bytes with any kind of information in XML, CSV, or any other format.
File Storage
It offers managed file sharing for cloud computing or on-premise distributions.
Table Storage
Table storage works as a NoSQL store specifically designed for storing structured data in a schema-less design.
How Microsoft Azure’s Storage Helps Businesses And Developers
Once you have discovered what each type of resource entails, here is an in-depth list of how all four storage resources help businesses and online platforms:
- Keeps track of big data insights
- Provides simple and reliable data storage
- Retrieves files whenever they are needed
- Keeps all the data secure
- Keeps a reliable backup
- Provides an integrative data solution
- Helps you automate tasks
- Helps with API management
- Offers smart scheduling for tasks
- Comes with the ability to run virtual machines
- Offers enhanced collaboration options
- Maintains version histories of all files
- Hosts legacy apps that are designed to interact with local file systems in the cloud
- Handles messages between web apps at scale
- Hosts static web pages
- Enforces immutability of data (files or documents)
- Provides shared folders to developers for sharing common resources
Cloud computing storage serves as the replica of all the data retrieved from your app. Similarly, the storage account works to replicate your app services data once you determine the level of replication for your cloud computing azure platform.
With that said, storage replication and availability options are divided into three categories, which are:
LRS: Locally Redundant (local replication of data with the lowest availability)
ZRS: Zone Redundant (Regional replication of data with average multiple cluster availability)
GRS: Geo-redundant (Secondary region replication of data with the highest availability)
Now that you know the basics of azure services storage and accounts, here is what you need to know about blob storage. It’s the most commonly used storage by developers and entails much more than one can specify.
What is Blob Storage?
Blob (Binary Large Object) is designed by Microsoft Azure developers to handle unstructured data of small to massive amounts. It can store binary large objects composed of unstructured data, which may include images, text, videos, metadata, and the list goes on. Blobs are stored on azure portal accounts but in azure active directory-like folders, also called containers, as they contain the data in them. Moreover, you can control the security parameters of the stored data at the container level and set the default behavior for better management.
- A blob is a data packet
- Blobs are stored in the form of containers
- A container is stored in the storage account
Types Of Blobs
Block Blobs
This type of blob is optimized to upload and store a large amount of data efficiently, and each block blob can be managed individually. Each block blob is identified through an ID and comprises up to 50,000 blocks. Moreover, each block blob’s size can vary from the other, and it can be maximized to an extent permissible by the blob storage version in use. Block Blobs are capable of storing up to 190.7 TiB (thread information block) data.
Append Blobs
This type of blob is also made up of blocks, but these are designed explicitly for append operations. With append blobs, users can easily log data from virtual machines. These blobs are composed of several different blocks, with each block storing up to 4MB of data. Each append blob is adept at holding up to 50,000 blocks. Hence, the storage of each append blob can go up to 200GB.
Page Blobs
These types of blobs store random access (read and write) files that can go up to 8 TiB in size. Page blobs are optimized to store VHD (Virtual Hard Drive) files. These blobs can also serve as storage disks for Azure virtual desktop & virtual machines.
3 Tiers Of Blob Storage Accounts
Blob storage is categorized into three tiers. Make sure you select the right one when creating the storage account.
Hot Access tier
This tier is ideally optimized for storing frequently accessed files and offers the lowest accessibility cost. However, it comes against the highest storage cost.
Cool Access Tier
This tier is designed for cases where data is to be stored for up to 30days at least without being accessed frequently. This tier comes against lower storage and higher accessibility cost.
Archive Access Tier
This tier is designed for storing data that doesn’t need to be accessed immediately. It comes against higher data retrieval and higher data access latency costs. It is ideal for cases where data will be stored for up to 180 days without anyone accessing it.
Why Use Blob Storage?
Data storage, in most cases, is focused on storing, managing, and distributing files, logs, images, videos, and other formats of data. Using blob storage ensures fulfilling this need with complete efficacy. It helps the users overcome the challenges they face when they want to deploy various databases to store different data types.
Blob storage provides ease of storage, consistency, flexibility, accessibility, and convenient management through a singular platform. Not only this, but it offers a myriad of services and options to suit the needs of various users.
For an overview, here is a list of tasks you can accomplish with a blob storage account.
- Stores images and documents that can be worked on directly through browsers
- Allows distributed access for files
- Offers video and audio streaming
- Saves all the log files and maintains them
- Provides backup and restore options for disaster recovery or archive
- Stores data to be analyzed later on
Moreover, you can control the access and storage according to the blob storage policies. To keep the original files safe, you can specify when a copy of the older version should be maintained. Lock the blobs to prevent modifications by any source or place them for a legal charge. All of these steps ensure that the documents for ongoing cases are never modified without permission from the authority.
Azure Blob Storage For Developers
Azure’s storage offers a Software Development Kit (SDK) for the users, making it easier for them to connect their web and app services portals to the repository. The kit works as a tool between the storage and the coded platform and helps the online storage interact with the development codes.
The SDK supports various coding languages, including Java, Python, Node.js, .NET, and many other languages. Here is how the code connects the storage to the portal by creating a container and uploading a file through a stream object. The stream comprises the bytes of files on the disk. Once the file is uploaded, the code retrieves the Uri to access the file.
Blob Storage Can Host Static Websites
Developers can upload their static assets over the web by creating a particular container. Once the file is uploaded, it can be accessed by the web without configuring a web server. This way, the developers can cut down tremendous cloud expenditure.
Azure Makes Data Accessible Over Various Operating Systems
Azure portal allows the users to create many mountable files over the azure cloud that can be shared across the web. Once uploaded and shared, the files can be accessed over any operating system such as macOS, Linux, and Windows. Software developers who face difficulties in sharing the legacy applications to the web can now create file shares and mount the files to the cloud through a virtual machine linked to the legacy application. This will make the app run flawlessly without any difference in its performance.
Azure Queue Handles The Communication For Your Applications
Queues serve as a swift and cost-efficient method for handling the messages sent and received through the application. It can take any format of messages, where the size of the message remains under 64 kilobytes. Most common approaches for text and strings that use Azure queue come as JSON-formatted data.
The cloud service proves to be very useful for communication with cloud-based clients, tracking backlogs of information, and storing many other sorts of messages or means of communication.
Wrapping Up
Databases are an outdated method of storing information and prove inefficient when paired up with the advanced web and app codes. With that said, Azure’s storage is the most sophisticated solution that fulfills the needs of modern tech-enabled platforms.
However, Azure’s storages is a professional-grade storage option that needs expert handling to utilize all of its aspects. The complex information may overwhelm a newbie. Therefore, if you are looking forward to redesigning your web or app storage platform using either Amazon Web Services , get help from experts to get the best out of the Microsoft Azure’s Storages Service.
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