Azure Fundamental – Azure Storage Services

We will discuss Azure storage services, types of Azure storage services, azure storage access tier, and its benefits.

1. What is Azure Storage Services?

Azure Storage Service is a managed storage service that is highly available, secure, durable, scalable, and redundant. It is Microsoft’s cloud storage solution for modern data storage scenarios.

Azure Storage Services offers highly available, massively scalable, durable, and secure storage for a variety of data objects in the cloud. Azure Storage data objects are accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS via a REST API.

The Azure Storage Service includes the following data services:

• Azure Blobs
• Azure Files
• Azure Elastic SAN
• Azure Queues
• Azure Tables
• Azure managed Disks
• Azure Container Storage

1.1 Azure Blobs

Azure Blob is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data. It Offers fully managed cloud file shares that can be accessed from anywhere via the industry standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, Network File System (NFS) protocol, and Azure Files REST API.

Objects in Blob Storage can be accessed from anywhere in the world via HTTP or HTTPS.

Blob Storage is ideal for:

• Serving images or documents directly to a browser.
• Storing files for distributed access.
• Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.
• Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service.

There are essentially 3 different types of blob :

• Block blobs: Block blobs are optimized for data streaming, and have some features which help to manage blobs such as an MD5 hash for verification or parallel uploads.
• Append blobs: Append blobs are used to append data. It means that each time changes are made to the blob, the data will be appended at the end of the blob. Data cannot be changed or deleted, only appended.
• Page blobs: A page blob consists of pages. A page is 512 bytes, and the blob can go up to 1 TB in size, used for fast read and write operations.

1.2 Azure Files

Azure Files sets up highly available network file shares that can be accessed by using the standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, Network File System (NFS) protocol, and Azure Files REST API.

Azure file storage makes it easy to move applications that depend on regular file shares to the cloud. File storage uses the SMB 2.1 or 3.0 protocol and can be accessed by multiple applications simultaneously.

File shares can be used for many common scenarios:

• Many on-premises applications use file shares.
• Configuration files can be stored on a file share and accessed from multiple VMs.
• Resource logs, metrics, and crash dumps are just three examples of data that can be written to a file share and processed or analyzed later.

1.3 Azure Elastic SAN

Azure Elastic SAN is a cloud-native Storage Area Network (SAN) that offers a scalable, cost-effective, high-performance, and comprehensive storage solution. It provides an end-to-end experience like on-premises SAN, with low single-digit millisecond latency, millions of IOPS, double-digit gbps, and disaster recovery support.

Elastic SAN is a fully integrated solution that simplifies deploying, scaling, managing, and configuring a SAN, while also offering built-in cloud capabilities like high availability. Elastic SAN is interoperable with multiple types of computing resources such as Azure Virtual Machines, Azure VMware Solutions, and Azure Kubernetes Service.

1.4 Azure Queues

The Azure Queue is a service used to store and retrieve messages. Queue messages can be up to 64 KB in size, and a queue can contain millions of messages. Queues are generally used to store lists of messages to be processed asynchronously. It allows for the decoupling of the components and has reliable asynchronous communication.

In Azure Queue Storage, the number of queues is only limited by the capacity of the storage account. Queues and messages can be created programmatically or using the Storage Explorer tool. Messages can be accessed from anywhere by using HTTP or HTTPS authenticated calls.

1.5 Azure Tables

Azure Table storage is a service that stores non-relational structured data in the cloud, providing an attribute store with a schematic design. It is a part of Azure Cosmos DB, used to store semi-structured data in a key-value format in a NoSQL datastore. It can store large amounts of structured data in petabytes, can scale, and is inexpensive.

Table storage can be accessed using REST and some of the Data protocols or using the Storage Explorer tool. Access to Table storage data is fast and cost-effective for many types of applications and is typically lower in cost than traditional SQL for similar volumes of data.

1.6 Azure managed Disks

Azure-managed disks are block-level storage volumes that are managed by Azure and used with Azure Virtual Machines. Disk storage provides disks for virtual machines, applications, and other services to access and use. VM uses disks as a place to store an operating system, applications, and data in Azure.

All virtual machines have at least two disks- a Windows operating system disk and a temporary disk. Both the operating system disk and the image are virtual hard disks (VHDs) stored in an Azure storage account. Azure-managed disks are stored as page blobs, which are random IO storage objects in Azure.

Different kinds of disks are offered by Azure:

• Unmanaged disks: Traditional type of disk that has been used by VMs. With these disks, a storage account can be created and specify that storage account at the time of creating the disk. There is no need to put too many disks in the same storage account, resulting in the VMs being throttled.
• Managed disks: Handles the storage account creation/management in the background and ensures that no need to worry about the scalability limits of the storage account. Disk size and the performance tier (standard/premium) will be specified, and Azure will create and manage the disks.

1.7 Azure Container Storage

Azure Container Storage is a cloud-based volume management, deployment, and orchestration service built natively for containers. It is a service that enables customers to create and manage volumes for running production-scale stateful container applications. It integrates with Kubernetes, allowing you to dynamically and automatically provision persistent volumes to store data for stateful applications running on Kubernetes clusters.

Azure Container Storage utilizes existing Azure Storage offerings for actual data storage and offers a volume orchestration and management solution purposely built for containers. It also offers persistent volume support with ReadWriteOnce access mode to Linux-based Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters.

2. Azure storage access tiers

Azure Storage offers different access tiers so blob data can be stored most cost-effectively based on how it’s being used. Azure Storage access tiers include:

• Hot tier
• Cool tier
• Archive tier

When the data is stored in an online access tier (either hot or cool), users can access it immediately. The hot tier is the best choice for data that is in active use. The cool tier is ideal for data accessed less frequently, but that still must be available for reading and writing. The archive tier is an offline tier for storing data that is rarely accessed.

3. Benefits of Azure Storage Services

• Durability and High Availability: Ensures that the data should be safe in the event of transient hardware failures. With such durable features as GRS or RA-GRS, storage services will automatically be highly available by replicating data in multiple facilities across multiple regions. 
• Security: All data written to an Azure storage account is encrypted by the service. Azure Storage relies on a Shared Key model for authentication security and can be further restricted through the use of a shared access signature (SAS).
• Scalability: Data is automatically scaled out and load-balanced to meet peak demands. Azure Storage provides a global namespace to access data from anywhere.
• Manageable: Azure handles hardware maintenance, updates, and critical issues.
• Accessibility: Azure Storage data are accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. A variety of languages are supported, such as NET, Java, Node.js, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Go.

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