Azure BLOB Storage

 The Azure Storage platform offers various services that cater to different scenarios:

·        Azure Blobs: Azure Blob Storage offers massively scalable object stores for storing text and binary data. It also includes support for big data analytics through Data Lake Storage Gen2.

·        Azure Queues: Microsoft offers Azure Queue Storage as a service for storing large numbers of messages. They can enable reliable messaging between applications and components.

·        Azure Tables: Azure Table storage is an excellent choice if we want to store structured NoSQL data in the cloud. It can store key and attribute values without defining a schema. 

·        Azure Disks: Azure Disks offer managed block-level storage volumes. We can easily attach them to Azure Virtual Machines.

·        Azure Files: Microsoft offers Azure File Storage as a fully managed cloud file share. We can access them from both cloud and on-premises services.

 

A Deeper Look at Azure BLOB Storage

Now let’s take a deeper look at the Azure BLOB storage. Microsoft offers Azure Blob storage for storing large object blobs in the cloud. This is optimized for storing large amounts of text or binary data.

Blob storage is ideal for many scenarios like:

·        Serving images or documents directly through the browser.

·        Storing files for access from multiple locations and services.

·        Streaming video and audio files.

·        Storing data for backup and restore operations, disaster recovery, and archiving, etc.

·        Storage for data analysis by both on-premises and Azure-hosted services.

We can access objects stored in BLOB storage from anywhere in the world via HTTP or HTTPS. Users or client applications can access files stored in BLOB storage via URLs,

the Azure Storage REST API, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, or Azure Storage client libraries (SDKs) that are available in various languages. In this example, we’ll see how to access Azure BLOB storage using Angular.

 

Structure of an Azure BLOB Storage

Blob storage has three types of resources:

·        Storage Accounts: A storage account provides a unique namespace in Azure for our data. Every object that we store in Azure Storage has an address that includes the unique account name. The combination of the account name and the Azure Storage BLOB endpoint forms the base address for the objects in the storage account.

·        Containers: Just like how a directory organizes files in a file system, containers organize a set of blobs. A storage account can include any number of containers, and a container can store an unlimited number of blobs.

·        Blobs: BLOB can store text and binary data. Blob storage offers three types of blobs – Block blobs, Append blobs, and Page blobs. We can specify the blob type while creating the blob. It is not possible to change its type afterward and we can only update a blob file using the operations appropriate for that particular blob type, for instance, we can only write a block or list of blocks to a block blob, append blocks to an append blob, and write pages to a page blob.

 

We can represent the structure of BLOB storage this way:

 

Types of blobs

Key concepts

Blob storage is designed for:

• Serving images or documents directly to a browser.
• Storing files for distributed access.
• Streaming video and audio.
• Writing to log files.
• Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.
• Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service.