Blobs in the Azure ecosystem

Blobs are one of the three simple storage options for Windows Azure, and are designed to store large files in binary format (refer to the Windows Azure diagram in Chapter 2, The Nickel Tour of Azure, for a reminder of how blobs fit into the Azure ecosystem). There are two types of blobs block blobs and page blobs. Block blobs are designed for streaming, and each blob can have a size of up to 200 GB. Page blobs are designed for read/write access and each blob can store up to 1 TB each. If we're going to store images or video for use in our application, we'd store them in blobs. On our local systems, we would probably store these files in different folders. In our Azure account, we place blobs into containers, and just as a local hard drive can contain any number of folders, each Azure account can have any number of containers.

Similar to folders on a hard drive, access to blobs is set at the container level, where permissions can be either "public read" or "private...