AZURE BLOB STORAGE

Azure Storage is a Microsoft-provided cloud service that has secure, durable, redundant, and scalable storage. You may have already heard about at least one option offered by Microsoft to store user data on the cloud. If I named them, they are file storage, table storage, blob storage, queue storage, and disk. The special thing about them is, each of these options has its unique purpose on behalf of fulfilling business needs.

What is Azure Blob storage?

Azure Blob Storage is a service that stores a large amount of unstructured data in the cloud as objects(blobs). Blob storage can store any type of text, images, videos, or binary data, such as a document, media file, or application installer. Blob storage is also referred to as object storage.

BLOBs = Binary Large Objects

Blob services :

Azure Blob Storage was designed to serve specific needs. If there is a use-case in your business or application to store unstructured data like audio, video, images, etc, then you should probably go with this option-Azure Blob. The objects which are being stored in Blob do not necessarily have an extension.

Followings are the uses of Blob -:

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

How does this Blob work?

Now you know, what is the use of blob and why it is available for us. Let's see how it works.

• Blob storage resources

Blob storage offers three types of resources:

1. The storage account
2. A container in the storage account
3. A blob in a container

Storage Account:

Accessing to Azure Storage is done through a storage account. The storage account can be a General-purpose storage account or a Blob storage account.

A storage account provides a unique namespace for your data. It creates a base address for the storage account by combining the account name and the Azure Storage blob endpoint. Think, if your storage account is named sampleaccount, then the default endpoint for Blob storage is: http://smapleaccount.blob.core.windows.net

Blob Container

A blob container is similar to a directory in a file system that organizes the blobs. A storage account can include an unlimited number of containers, and a container can store an unlimited number of blobs. Simply, all blobs should be within a container.

Note: Always the container name is in simple letters.

Blobs

A blob is any type/ any size file.

There are 3 types of blobs.

• Block blobs: Ideal for storing text or binary files, like documents and media files. [Size-up to about 190.7 TiB]
• Append blobs: Similar to block blobs but they are optimized for append operations, so they are useful for logging scenarios. [Size-up to 50,000 blocks of up to 4 MB each]
• Page blobs: more efficient for frequent read/write operations and stores virtual hard drive (VHD) files and serves as disks for Azure virtual machines. [Size- up to 8TiB in size]

Why use Blob Storage?

“Much of what data consumers do with storage is focused on dealing with unstructured data such as logs, files, images, videos, etc. Using Azure’s blob storage is a way to overcome the challenge of having to deploy different database systems for different types of data. Blob storage provides users with strong data consistency, storage and access flexibility that adapts to the user’s needs, and it also provides high availability by implementing geo-replication.”

Advantages of using it:

1. Convenience because it ensures coding for durability.
2. Efficiency because it can search and obtain any stored data without accessing it manually.
3. Data protection is high because in blobs, data becomes redundant and self-healing due to shadow copying and geo-redundancies.
4. Security is high as all data are automatically encrypted and protected in there.
5. No need for infrastructure management
6. Blob has a strong consistency as it always ensures the user has superior data integrity.
7. Blob has object mutability.
8. Blob has multiple blob types, and so it gives more flexibility to select an option which is matches with user’s requirements.
9. Blob has ‘Geo-Redundancy’. It enhances both local and global access.
10. Blob has Worldwide access, so from anywhere in the world, anyone can access it. It helps to access the right people at the right time without considering their physical location.

Thank you for reading my article. Hope to bring you more articles about Azure.