Storage Services: Azure Storage Account

Introduction

Software applications and general IT operations usually require storing different data types, such as images, binary files, backups, and virtual machines desk data, among many others.

The service that supports this storage capability in Microsoft Azure is Azure Storage account. As we will see next, the Azure Storage account supports several storage capabilities.

Types of Azure Storage account

Azure Storage account supports several different types of storage services. Here is a short summary of each service:

• Blob Storage: This is an object storage service designed to store massive amounts of unstructured data, such as binary files, images, videos, and audio.
• Azure Files: A managed file share service that allows accessing files using industry-standard SMB (server message block) and NFS (network file system) protocols.
• Queue Storage: A service for storing many messages in a first in, first out (FIFO) manner.
• Table Storage: A non-relational data storage service that allows storing large amounts of data in a cost-effective manner.
• Data Lake Storage Gen2: A service to store massive amounts of enterprise data (in petabytes) with high throughput (in gigabits per second). It also supports hierarchical namespaces to organize objects in directories and subdirectories, similar to the computer file system.

Each type of these services is worth several lessons on its own. ...