Azure Blob Storage – Microsoft AZ-900 Exam

7.1. Azure Blob Storage

Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft Azure’s object storage solution for the cloud. Blob Storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data, which makes it ideal for serving images or documents directly to a browser, storing files for distributed access, streaming video and audio, writing to log files, storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving, as well as storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service.

Understanding Azure Blob Storage

Blob Storage Defined: Blob (Binary Large Object) Storage is designed to handle the storage needs of large amounts of unstructured data or binary data that is not generally in a particular data model or definition. It’s a service that stores these blobs in a structured manner, offers high availability, and provides security and performance.

Types of Blobs: Azure Blob Storage contains three types of blobs: block blobs, append blobs, and page blobs.

  1. Block Blobs: They are composed of blocks and are ideal for storing text and binary data, up to ~4.75 TiB in size. Block blobs are made up of blocks of data that can be managed individually.
  2. Append Blobs: They are optimized for append operations, which make them a good choice for scenarios such as logging data from virtual machines.
  3. Page Blobs: These are up to 8 TiB in size and are more suited for random read and write operations. They are often used to store VHD files and serve as disks for Azure virtual machines.

Features of Azure Blob Storage

Scalability: Azure Blob Storage is designed to scale out, meaning it can handle more data and more transactions without a reduction in performance. This scalability is a cornerstone feature, as it allows companies to grow their storage as their data needs expand without the hassle of managing infrastructure.

Durability and High Availability: Blob Storage has an automatic replication feature that ensures durability and high availability of your data. Data can be replicated across data centers located in the same region, across different regions, or even geographically distant areas to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery.

Security: Azure Blob Storage provides multiple layers of security. It supports Azure Active Directory for authentication, uses Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for authorizing access to data, provides encryption at rest using Azure Storage Service Encryption, and enables encryption in transit with HTTPS.

Lifecycle Management: With Azure Blob Storage, you can automate the lifecycle of your blobs with a policy-based approach. You can set rules to transition blobs to a cooler storage tier or delete them at the end of their lifecycle.

Performance: The performance of Blob Storage is dependent on the storage tier chosen: Hot, Cool, or Archive. Each tier is priced differently and is optimized for specific scenarios ranging from data that is accessed frequently to data that is rarely accessed and stored long-term.

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