What are Core Azure Storage services?
The Azure Storage platform is Microsoft’s cloud storage solution for modern data storage scenarios. Core storage services offer a massively scalable object store for data objects, disk storage for Azure virtual machines (VMs), a file system service for the cloud, a messaging store for reliable messaging, and a NoSQL store. Some features of these services are –
- Firstly, Durable and highly available
- Secondly, Secure
- Subsequently, Scalable
- Furthermore, Managed
- Finally, Accessible
Core storage services
The Azure Storage platform includes the following data services:
- Firstly, Azure Blobs: A massively scalable object store for text and binary data. Also includes support for big data analytics through Data Lake Storage Gen2.
- Also, Azure Files: Managed file shares for cloud or on-premises deployments.
- Furthermore, Azure Queues: A messaging store for reliable messaging between application components.
- Also, Azure Tables: A NoSQL store for schemaless storage of structured data.
- Finally, Azure Disks: Block-level storage volumes for Azure VMs.
Each service is accessed through a storage account.
Blob storage
Azure Blob storage is Microsoft’s object storage solution for the cloud. Blob storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data.
Azure Files
Azure Files enables you to set up highly available network file shares that can be accessed by using the standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. That means that multiple VMs can share the same files with both read and write access. You can also read the files using the REST interface or the storage client libraries.
Queue storage
The Azure Queue service is 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.
Table storage
Azure Table storage is now part of Azure Cosmos DB. To see Azure Table storage documentation, see the Azure Table Storage Overview. In addition to the existing Azure Table storage service, there is a new Azure Cosmos DB Table API offering that provides throughput-optimized tables, global distribution, and automatic secondary indexes.
Disk storage
An Azure managed disk is a virtual hard disk (VHD). You can think of it like a physical disk in an on-premises server but, virtualized. Azure-managed disks are stored as page blobs, which are a random IO storage object in Azure. We call a managed disk ‘managed’ because it is an abstraction over page blobs, blob containers, and Azure storage accounts.
Types of storage accounts
Azure Storage offers several types of storage accounts. Each type supports different features and has its own pricing model.
Every request to Azure Storage must be authorized. Azure Storage supports the following authorization methods.
- Fistly, Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) integration for blob and queue data
- Also, Azure AD authorization over SMB for Azure Files
- Subsequently, Authorization with Shared Key
- Also, Authorization using shared access signatures (SAS)
- Finally, Anonymous access to containers and blobs
Reference documentation – Introduction to the core Azure Storage services