Introduction:
The Azure Storage platform is a cloud storage solution provided by Microsoft to cover all modern data storage scenarios. IT provides highly available, scalable, durable and secure storage for various data objects in the cloud – making it easy to access data from anywhere in the world using HTTP or HTTPS via a REST API. Azure Storage also offers client libraries for developers building applications or services with .NET, Java, Python, JavaScript, C++, and Go. Developers and IT professionals can use Azure PowerShell and Azure CLI to write scripts for data management or configuration tasks. The Azure portal and Azure Storage Explorer provide user interface tools for accessing the Azure Storage.
Azure Storage has many benefits for example, it is durable and highly available by providing redundancy. Making sure that the data is safe in case of hardware failure. One can also choose to replicate data across data centres in different geographical regions to safeguard it in case of a natural disaster or some other issues. The data stored in the Azure storage accounts is encrypted by the service with client having control over who can access the data and in which way. It is also scalable, meaning that it provides real time increase of decrease in storage capacity depending on the performance needs of the application. Azure Storage is managed by Microsoft – means that all the hardware maintenance and updates are handled for the clients. As a storage solution on cloud Azure Storage is highly accessible and can be accessed anywhere from the world with Internet.
All the Azure Storage Services can be accessed via a storage account. There are several types of storage accounts each with its own set of features and pricing models. The detail about the storage accounts can be accessed here.
Types of Storage Service in Azure Storage
The Azure Storage platform includes the following data services:
Azure Blobs: A massively scalable object store for text and binary data including streaming and image data. Also includes support for big data analytics through Data Lake Storage Gen2.
Azure Files: Managed file shares for cloud or on-premises deployments. These file shares can be easily accessed via the industry standards, for example, SMB, NFS and Azure Files REST API.
Azure Elastic SAN: A fully integrated solution that simplifies deploying, scaling, managing, and configuring a SAN in Azure. It is interoperable with multiple types of compute resources such as virtual machines, VMWare Solutions and Kubernetes Service.
Azure Queues: A messaging store for reliable messaging between application components. The messages can be accessed anywhere from the world via authenticated calls using HTTP or HTTPS.
Azure Tables: A NoSQL store for schemaless storage of structured data making it easy to adapt your data as the needs of your application evolve. Accessing Table storage data is fast and economical for many types of applications and is typically lower in cost than traditional SQL for similar volumes of data.
Azure managed Disks: Block-level storage volumes for Azure Virtual Machines. These are like physical disks in an on-premises server but virtualized. They are easy to provision, all you have to do is specify the size and type and Azure will handle the rest.
Azure Container Storage (preview): A volume management, deployment, and orchestration service built natively for containers. It integrates with Kubernetes, allowing the user to provision persistent volumes dynamically and automatically to store data for stateful applications running on Kubernetes clusters.
Which Storage Service to use When?
Azure Blobs: They are best used when the application needs to support streaming and random-access scenarios. It is also best used when you want to build an enterprise data lake on Azure and perform big data analysis. The most common scenario is to store images or documents and access them directly via a browser. Also excellent for storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery and archiving.
Azure Files: You want to “lift and shift” an application to the cloud that already uses the native file system APIs to share data between it and other applications running in Azure. Azure Files can also be used when you want to scale the on-premises file servers or NAS machines. It can also be used to store tools or set-ups that need to be accessed from multiple machines. File share can be used to write resource logs, metrics, and crash dumps and processed or analysed later.
Azure Elastic SAN: Best use for Azure Elastic SAN is when a large-scale storage is needed that is interoperable with multiple types of compute resources – including SQL and NoSQL databases, virtual machines, and Kubernetes Services.
Azure Queues: Best use to create a backlog od work to process asynchronously, like in the Web-Queue-Worker architectural style. A queue can hold a message up to 64 KB in size and it can contain million of messages, up to the total capacity of the storage account.
Azure Tables: Azure tables can store TBs of structured data that can be accessed by web scale applications. It can also be ideal for storing datasets that do not complex joins, foreign keys and can be denormalized for fast access. Azure tables are available through Azure Cosmos DB for Table, which offers higher performance and available, global distribution, and automatic secondary indexes.
Azure Managed Disks: When you want to “lift and shift” the applications from the on-premises servers to the read and write data to persistent disks. Also, they can be used when the data isn’t required to be accessed from outside the virtual machine to which disk is attached.
Azure Container Storage: If you have highly fluctuating data needs to you want them to be dynamically and automatically met by the system then using Azure Container Storage is an excellent choice. It will provision persistent volumes to store data for stateful applications running on Kubernetes clusters.
Conclusion:
Azure Storage provides various types of storage solutions to cover all our storage needs from storing streaming data to managing our work loads via Azure Queues. These storage solutions are reliable, secure, and highly affordable and can be accessed from anywhere in the world. These storage services provide a high scalability without wait. The need of the hour is to familiarize with the service and choose the one that is best suited for our organizational needs.
Sugandh Wafai
Consultant