Creating an Azure SMB file share
Azure provides you with the ability to create SMB shares with an Azure storage account. These SMB shares act the same as the local on-premises SMB shares you used in Chapter 10, Managing Shared Data. The key difference is how you create them and the credentials that you use to access the shares.
Before an SMB client can access data held in an SMB share, the SMB client needs to authenticate with the SMB server. With Windows-based shares, you either specify a user credential object (user ID and password) or, in a domain environment, the SMB client utilizes Kerberos to authenticate. With Azure, you use the storage account name as the user ID and the storage account key as the password.
The storage account key contains two properties, imaginatively named key1 and key2. The values of these two properties are valid passwords for Azure SMB file shares. Having two keys enables you to do regular key rotation. If your application uses the value of key1...
