Azure Storage is the bedrock of Microsoft's core storage solution offering in Azure. No matter what solution you are building for the cloud, you'll find find Azure Storage to be essential.

Azure Storage is a very scalable and highly available solution. You can store up to hundreds of terabytes of data. The data stored in Azure Storage is protected from corruption or loss because Azure Storage provides a highly available storage service that ensures that your data will be available, even if the primary storage server gets damaged.

There are many reasons for using Azure Storage, which will be covered throughout this book. Some of them are listed here:

Azure Storage has many types and even sub-types, to satisfy Azure service consumer needs.

The most common types can be classified based on the following factors:

• Durability (replication)
• Performance (standard versus premium)
• Persistency (persistent versus non-persistent)

One of the most popular questions about the cloud in general is what if, for some reason, the SAN/servers that store my data are completely destroyed? How can I restore my data?

The answer is very simple. Microsoft Azure Storage is durable and supports data replication; therefore, you can make sure your storage is highly available.

Replication ensures that your data is copied somewhere else, whether it is in the same data center...

An Azure storage account is a secure account that provides access to Azure storage services (which will be covered later in this chapter), and a unique namespace for storage resources.

During the creation of a new Azure storage account, you will have the option to choose one of three kinds of storage accounts:

• Storage (general purpose v1)
• StorageV2 (general purpose v2)
• Blob storage account

A general-purpose storage account v1 gives you access to all Azure Storage services, such as blobs, tables, files, and queues, in a unified account. It has two performance tiers: standard and premium. This type is not the most cost-effective type of storage and it is the only type...

In this section, we will get create an Azure storage account. To do so, perform the following steps:

1. Open the Azure portal from here: https://portal.azure.com/.

2. Click on All services and a new blade will open. In the search bar, write storage account, as shown in the following screenshot:

3. Click on Storage accounts and a new blade will open. Click on Add, as shown in the following screenshot:

4. A new blade will open. You need to fill in the fields and determine the following:
   • Name: The name of the storage account.
   • Deployment model: Select the deployment model that fits you. Only use Classic if you have other classic resources that need this resource to be classic too.
   • Account kind: Select the account kind that fulfill your needs.
   • Location: Select...

Azure Storage has multiple services that will fit most scenarios. At the moment, there are four types of Azure Storage services, which are as follows:

• Blob storage
• Table storage
• Queue storage
• File storage

Each of these services can be used for different scenarios, which we will cover in detail shortly.

Blob stands for binary large object. This type of service can store almost everything, since it stores unstructured data, such as documents, files, images, VHDs, and so on.

Using the Azure Blob storage service allows you to store everything that we have just mentioned, and you can access anything from anywhere using different access methods, such as URLs, REST APIs, or even one of the Azure...

Learning how to work with Azure Storage and how to design it to fit your solution is everyone's purpose, but learning what is going on behind the scenes and what every piece means is what makes you an expert.

Azure Storage is a distributed storage software stack built by Microsoft. The storage access architecture consists of the following three layers:

• Frontend layer
• Partition layer
• Stream layer

The frontend layer is responsible for receiving incoming requests, their authentication, and authorization, and then delivers them to a partition server in the partition layer.

You may wonder, how does the frontend know which partition server to forward each request to? The answer is...

In this chapter the information required to get your hands on Azure Storage has been covered. That includes identifying the different types of Azure Storage, storage services, which types of account services you should use, and so on. The chapter concluded with what's happening behind the scenes for Azure Storage to help you to fully understand it.

In the next chapter, we will cover Azure networking and how it works in Azure, the same as Azure Storage.

1. Premium storage is only available for the locally redundant storage replication type. (True | False)
2. Unlike all storage replication types, RA-GRS can be accessed whenever you want. (True | False)
3. You can downgrade from Storage Account v2 to Storage Account v1. (True | False)

4. Block blobs are the best Blob storage type for VHDs. (True | False)
5. Table storage is the best storage service for messaging. (True | False)
6. The stream layer is the layer responsible for storing bits on disk, and for data durability in Azure Storage. (True | False)

• Learning Microsoft Azure Storage (https://www.packtpub.com/big-data-and-business-intelligence/learning-microsoft-azure-storage)
• Azure File Sync (https://4sysops.com/archives/install-azure-file-sync-afs/)
• Get started with Azure Table storage using .NET (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/table-storage-how-to-use-dotnet)
• Get started with Azure Queue storage using .NET (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/queues/storage-dotnet-how-to-use-queues)
• Azure Storage security guide (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-security-guide)