Choosing Your Data Storage in the Cloud
Azure, like other clouds, offers a wide range of storage services. The first approach that we may consider is defining a scalable set of virtual machines hosted in the cloud where we can implement our custom solutions. For instance, we can create a SQL Server cluster on our cloud-hosted virtual machines to increase reliability and computational power. However, usually, custom architectures are not the optimal solution and do not take full advantage of the opportunities offered by cloud infrastructure. Scalability, fast setup, focus on the business, and security are some of the criteria that you might consider while deciding on your data storage on Azure. To help you with this, many of the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) options for storing data can be a great solution.
Therefore, this chapter will not discuss such custom architectures but will focus mainly on the various PaaS storage offerings that are available in the cloud and on Azure. These...