Hosting the data
Azure Services have grown faster (as in the number of services and the surface area) than in the past, at an amazingly increasing rate, and consequently, we have several options to store any kind of data (such as relational, NoSQL, binary, JSON, and so on), but in this part we focus on the two main services we've found since the beginning of Azure: Storage and the SQL database (the former known as SQL Azure).
Storage
Azure Storage is the base service for almost everything on the platform: VMs use it explicitly to host the disks. Cloud Services use it transparently for the same purpose, users take advantage of it to store application data, and almost every service uses it to save diagnostic and logging data.
Storage security is implemented in two different ways:
- Account keys
- Shared Access Signatures
Account keys
When a Storage Account is created, two Account keys (primary and secondary) provide full access to the various services of the Storage Account (blobs, tables, queues...
