Hello and welcome to core storage services in Azure. In this lesson, we will take a look at some of the core storage offerings, including blob storage, Azure Files, queue storage, table storage, and disk storage. However, before we get into the separate storage services, let’s take a look at some of the benefits of Azure storage.

Because the Azure storage platform is designed for virtually all modern-day data storage requirements, it was built to offer several key benefits. First and foremost, all Azure storage services are durable and highly available. Built-in redundancy keeps data safe in the event of underlying hardware failures within the Azure infrastructure. In addition to this redundancy, you can also cross multiple data centers and even multiple geographical regions. This provides protection against natural disasters or local failures at the data center level.

Because all data that gets written to Azure storage accounts is encrypted automatically, it is inherently secure as well. Azure also offers the ability to maintain fine-grained control over data access. 

Azure storage offerings are also scalable and widely accessible. As I mentioned earlier, the Azure storage platform is designed to support all modern-day data storage requirements. That being the case, it’s designed to be massively scalable. You can access Azure data from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. There are also numerous client libraries available for Azure storage in numerous languages. This means you can access Azure storage using things like .NET, Java, Python, PHP, and many others.

You can also access Azure storage through PowerShell scripting, through the Azure CLI, through the Azure portal, and through Azure Storage Explorer.

So now that you understand some of the key benefits of the core Azure storage services, let’s take an introductory look at each of them.

Let’s start with Azure blobs.

Azure blob storage provides object storage for the cloud. This offering has been optimized to support massive amounts of unstructured data. Unstructured data is data that does not fit a specific data model. For example, text and binary data would be the type of unstructured data that falls under blob storage.

Azure Files is essentially a fully managed file share system available in the cloud. You can access Azure Files through the typical SMB protocol. You can mount Azure file shares from Windows, Linux, and MacOS machines that reside both on-prem and in the cloud. You can even cash Azure file shares on Windows servers, using the Azure file sync service. This helps make data more accessible for remote offices.

Azure queue storage is a special type of storage service. It’s not meant for storing files. Instead, it’s designed for storing large numbers of messages. These messages are used in communications between the different components of a distributed application. Such messages can be accessed from anywhere in the world through authenticated calls via HTTP or HTTPS. Each queue message can be up to 64 KB in size. A typical queue can contain millions of messages.

Azure table storage is a storage offering intended for the storage of structured NoSQL data. It offers a key/attribute store and a schema-less design. The schema-less design of Azure table storage allows you to more easily adapt the data to the needs of your business or application.

Lastly, let’s take a look at Azure managed disks. Azure managed disks are essentially block-level storage volumes. These storage volumes, which are managed by Azure, are used, to provide storage capabilities for virtual machines. A managed disk is much like a physical desk that you would see in an on-prem server. However, it’s virtualized. There are several types of disks available in Azure. They include ultra disks, premium SSD disks, standard SSD disks and standard HDD disks. We will touch on these in more detail later on.

So, to wrap things up for this lesson, let’s review. There are essentially five different core storage services available in Microsoft Azure. They include Azure blobs, Azure Files, Azure queues, Azure tables, and Azure disks. Each of these storage services are accessed through an Azure storage account. Over the next several lessons, we will dive into storage accounts and into the details of each core storage service in Microsoft Azure.