Azure tutorials series - Azure Storage

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Having covered the basics of Azure and cloud in our previous article. We will be learning about Azure Storage products in this article.

Azure Storage -

  • Secure, Durable, scalable and easily accessible
  • Benefits includes
    • Automated backup and Recovery
    • Replication across the globe
    • Support for data analytics
    • Encryption capabilities
    • Supports multiple data types
    • Data storage in virtual disks
    • Storage tiers- categories data such as frequently used or rarely used.
  • There are 4 storage account in Microsoft Azure  -
    1. Blob Service(also known as Containers) - Stores Unstructured or binary data. Blob is a binary large object, It could be a log, .doc, .pdf, img, .exe file. 
    2.  File Service - Highly available file shares. It uses Blobs but handles them differently, it could be like say one drive or dropbox. We can say it is a File based cloud location in Azure.
    3. Table service - Pre-dominantly available for Application developers, majorly available in Key-value pairs. It consists of Structured, non - relational data which could be originated from cosmos DB or Non-relational database.
    4. Queue Service - Asynchronous message storing and retrieval service, say we have different components and each component can interact with one another through queues.

Blob Storage Tiers - 

It can have you save your cost effectively, user generally has to choose between the following options in order to define its data -
  1. Hot - Frequently accessed data. How much space is occupied in the storage account, hot gives the discount in every transaction but not on the amount of space you are occupying.
  2. Cold - Infrequently accessed data(30 days). You don't get the discount in your transaction but can get it for Storage since it is rarely accessed.
  3. Archive - Rarely accessed data. You get a good discount here since the data is hardly used. The data is maintained for only 180 days.

Disk Storage

  • Disks which can store data either for VM, applications or other services.
  • Can be  categorised as
    • Solid-state Drives(SSD)
    • Hard Disk Drives(HDD)
  • SSDs and HSDs are used for less critical workloads while Premium SSDs are used for mission-critical production applications.
  • Files can either be stored with VHD extension or generation 1 or generation 2.
  • It doesn't require storage accounts using Azure.
  • Earlier we had security issues as well as performance issues when storage accounts were used.
  • Enables Snapshot backup, resizing and full-disk encryption.

Types of Data

Data can be categorised into
  • Structured Data
    • Also called relational data
    • Data is well structured as well as maintained, as in Tables have relationships between them, which can be accessed using a key. Tables has columns and rows.
  • Semi-structured data
    • Also called non-relational or NoSQL data
    • Doesn't follow the concept of tables, rows or columns. 
    • Uses tags or keys to provide a hierarchy to the data
  • Unstructured data
    • Data which has no standard structure
    • Could be a PDF doc, JPG image, JSON file or a video or audio, etc.

Azure Storage types

Azure SQL Database

  • Relational Database
  • High performance, reliable, fully managed and secure database
  • Your existing Database could easily be migrated to Azure cloud platform using Azure Database Migration Service with minimal downtime
  • The Database will continue to work with a little twitch in connection string.
SQL Data Warehouse(Azure Synapse)
  • Cloud data warehouse platform
  • Automatic scaling
  • Unified experience
  • Powerful insights
  • Security
Azure Cosmos DB
  • Provides distributed access
  • Stores data in JSON format, schema-less data
  • Highly suitable for the applications with dynamic data
  • Microsoft provides SLA of 99.999% for read and write operations
  • Can add data concurrently from multiple regions.
  • Extremely fast in responding to requests for small amounts of data.
  • Low latency
Azure Blob Storage
  • Unstructured data
  • Can store massive amount of data in any format.
  • Supports upto 8 TB of Storage for Virtual Machines
  • Can be reached from anywhere in the world.
  • Serving images or documents directly to a browser
  • Writing to log files
  • Streaming video and audio.

Azure Data Lake Storage

  • Allows to perform analysis on the data usage and prepare reports
  • Stores both structured and unstructured data
  • Highly scalable and cost effective, reliable and well performed storage
  • If you are looking at storing data that is not frequently used, you can use the Azure Data Lake service.

Azure Files

  • File sharing over a cloud network
  • Any number of users can access the file simultaneously if access is provided
  • For instance, if we need to map a network drive from several computers that runs windows 10 to Azure Storage. 
Azure Queues
  • Highly effective for load balancing
  • Components or Applications interact with one another with the help of queues, can be JMS queue or any other.
  • An application is highly scalable if its components are interacting with the help of a queue
  • Provides asynchronous message queuing
  • Consists of Sender components and receiver components in which sender adds message to the queue, and receiver consumes the message.

Encryption Types

Azure Storage Service Encryption(SSE)
  • Performs data encryption while storing the data
  • Decrypts the data before releasing it
  • Data encryption and decryption is transparent to the user.

Why Migrate to Cloud?

  • Cost-effectiveness - Pay-as-you-go model
  • Reliability
  • Agility
  • Scalable
  • High availability
Note - When an virtual machine is stopped, you still continue to pay storage cost associated with the virtual machine.

Exam questions - Azure files offers fully managed file shares in the cloud accessible via the industry standard Server Message Block(SMB) protocol. 

Note - Data copied to an Azure storage account is maintained automatically in at least three copies.

A driveset and dataset CSV files to be used to import the data in storage accounts.

It is difficult to estimate the cost of unmanaged storage account because there is no way to predict the amount of data in the account.


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