This course is intended for those who wish to learn about the basics of Microsoft Azure storage, covering the core storage services in Azure and the different storage account types that are available. You'll watch a demonstration that shows you how to create a storage account in Microsoft Azure.
The course then moves on to look at the storage services in more detail: blob storage, Azure Files, Azure Queues, and Azure Tables. We'll also cover encryption and bursting.
This course contains hands-on demonstrations from the Azure portal so that you can see the concepts covered in this course put into practice. If you have any feedback relating to this course, feel free to reach out to us at support@cloudacademy.com.
Learning Objectives
- Define the major components of Azure Storage
- Understand blob storage and what it offers
- Understand how to use Azure Files
- Learn about Azure Queues and how to create a queue
- Learn why and when to use an Azure Table
Intended Audience
This course is intended for anyone who wants to learn the basics of Azure Storage.
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this course, you should have a basic understanding of the Microsoft Azure platform.
Hello and welcome to blob storage. In this lesson, we are going to take a closer look at blob storage and when you should use it.
Azure Blob storage, as I mentioned earlier in this course, is an object storage solution in Azure. It’s optimized to allow the storage of massive amounts of unstructured data, including text and binary data.
You would typically use blob storage to host images and documents that you wish to serve up to a web browser. Think images on a website. Blob storage is also used when you wish to stream video or audio or to store log files. Organizations will also often use blob storage to store backup data, archive data, and data that needs to be analyzed by some on-prem process or Azure-hosted process.
To access objects in blob storage, you can use HTTP or HTTPS. You can also access blob storage objects through the Azure storage rest API, through Azure PowerShell, through the Azure CLI, or through an Azure storage client library such as Java, PHP, .NET, or several others.
There are three types of resources that you should be familiar with when discussing blob storage. They include the storage account that hosts the blob storage, containers within the storage account, and the blobs within those containers.
The image on your screen depicts the relationship between these resources.
The storage account creates the unique namespace in Azure that you use to access your data. When you access your data, you’ll use a combination of the storage account name and the Azure Storage blob endpoint that you are trying to access. Together, these two pieces form the base address for the objects that reside in the storage account.
For example, the URL that you see on your screen would be used to access blob storage in a storage account called MyStorage:
http://mystorage.blob.core.windows.net
Containers within a storage account are used to organize the blobs within the account. You can view containers like directories in a file system. You can create an unlimited number of containers within a storage account, and each container can store an unlimited number of blobs.
There are actually three types of blobs that Azure storage supports. They include block blobs, append blobs, and page blobs. Block blobs can contain up to about 190.7TiB of text and binary data. They are called block blobs because they consist of blocks of data that can be managed individually.
Append blobs are similar to block blobs insofar as they, too, consist of blocks of data. However, unlike block blobs, append blobs are optimized for append operations. This makes append blobs a good choice for logging data from virtual machines.
Page blobs are used to store random access files up to 8 TiB in size. You would typically use page blobs to store VHD files, which would serve as disks for Azure virtual machines.
To learn more about blob storage, visit the URL that you see on your screen:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blobs-introduction
Tom is a 25+ year veteran of the IT industry, having worked in environments as large as 40k seats and as small as 50 seats. Throughout the course of a long an interesting career, he has built an in-depth skillset that spans numerous IT disciplines. Tom has designed and architected small, large, and global IT solutions.
In addition to the Cloud Platform and Infrastructure MCSE certification, Tom also carries several other Microsoft certifications. His ability to see things from a strategic perspective allows Tom to architect solutions that closely align with business needs.
In his spare time, Tom enjoys camping, fishing, and playing poker.