Introduction to the Azure File Service

Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines are a very foundational and fundamental resource in Cloud Computing. Deploying virtual machines gives you more flexibility and control over your cloud infrastructure and services, however, it also means you have more responsibility to maintain and configure these resources. This course gives you an overview of why use virtual machines as well as how to create, configure, and monitor VMs in Azure Resource Manager.

Azure Resource Manager Virtual Machines: What You'll Learn

Lesson	What you'll learn
Overview	Overview of the course and the Learning Objectives
What is a Virtual Machine?	Understand what are Azure Virtual Machines and what workloads are ideal for VMs
Creating and Connecting to Azure VMs	Learn to deploy Windows and Linux VMs as well as how to connect to these VMs
Scaling Azure Virtual Machines	Understand VM scaling, load-balancing, and Availability Sets in Azure Resource Manager
Configuration Management	Understand the basic concepts of Desired State Configuration and the options available to Azure VMs
Design and Implement VM Storage	Gain an understanding of the underlying Storage options available to VMs as well as Encryption
Configure Monitoring & Alerts for Azure VMs	Learn to monitor VMs in Azure Resource Manager as well as configure alerts.
Summary	Course summary and conclusion

 

The Azure File Service is a useful public service offered by Azure that allows you to do file sharing just as we’re used to on-prem.

In the lesson on implementing VM Storage we mentioned there were different storage types including Blobs, Files, Disks, Tables and Queues. The Azure File Service deals with the “Files” storage option. As you can see in this illustration, you can create a standalone storage account and place files in a container on this storage account which is accessible to Azure VMs over the SMB protocol as well as external internet connectivity over HTTP/HTTPS with the proper credentials. The Azure File Service just like typical File sharing protocols on Windows uses SMB as the file-sharing protocol. You can even setup your own OneDrive or Dropbox type of service backed by the Azure File Service or share application settings and diagnostic data across applications.