Managing Azure Files (File Service)

Azure Files (often called File Service or File Storage) is a managed solution that’s part of Azure Storage. While Blob Storage, as described in Chapter 9, enables us to store various files, configure their life cycles, and replicate them accordingly, Azure Files is meant as an enterprise-grade file share solution that can be integrated with the end user machine as a replacement for on-premises shares. Such an approach allows you to simplify infrastructure setup and lower the cost of operations as you no longer need to manage infrastructure yourself.

Let’s start our journey with Azure Files by describing possible access protocols.

Available access protocols

As Azure Files is a cloud-based file share, to be useful as a replacement for on-premises components, it needs to support a similar set of common protocols that are used in file-sharing scenarios. For now, this service supports the following access methods:

• Server...