Introduction to Azure Storage Account

Azure Storage Account is Microsoft’s cloud storage solution for latest data storage scenarios. Azure Storage provides an object store which is a tediously expandable object store for data objects. In addition to this, a file system service for the cloud, a messaging store for reliable messaging, and a NoSQL store is also provided by the Azure Storage.

Azure Storage is

• Durable: Redundancy ensures that your data is safe in the event of transient hardware failures. You can also opt to replicate data across datacentres or geographical regions for additional protection from local catastrophe or natural disaster.
• Highly available: Data replicated in this way remains highly available in the event of an unexpected outage.
• Secure: All the data written to Azure Storage is converted into code by the service. Azure Storage provides you with own access control policy over who has access to your data.
• Scalable: Azure Storage is designed to be massively extensible to meet the data storage and performance needs of today’s applications.
• Managed: Microsoft Azure handles hardware maintenance, updates, and critic issues for you.
• Accessible: Data in Azure Storage is available from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. Microsoft provides SDKs for Azure Storage in a variety of languages.

These are the following services in Azure Storage Account

1. Azure Blobs:

   Azure Blob storage is Microsoft’s object storage explication for the cloud. Blob storage is efficient for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data.

2. Azure Files:

   Azure Files enables you to set up highly accessible network file shares that can be accessed by using the standard Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. That means that many virtual machines share the same files with both read and write access. These files can also be read using the storage client libraries or REST interface.

3. Azure Queues:

   The Azure Queue service is used to retrieve and store messages. Queue messages can be up to 64 KB in size, and a queue can contain trillions of messages. Queues are generally used to store lists of messages to be handled asynchronously.

4. Azure Table Storage:

   Azure Table storage is now an element of Azure Cosmos DB. Along with the Azure Table storage service, there is also a new Azure Cosmos DB Table API which provides throughput-optimized tables, global distribution, and automatic secondary indexes.

Accessing blobs, files, and queues

Each storage account has two keys, either of which can be used for any operation. There are two keys, so you can roll over the keys occasionally to improve the security. It is critical that these keys be kept secure because their possession, along with the account name, allows unlimited access to all data in the storage account.

Replication options for an Azure Storage Account include

1. Locally Redundant Storage: A simple, low-cost replication strategy. Data gets duplicate within a single storage scale unit.
2. Zone Redundant Storage: Replication for high availability and durability. Data is replicated synchronously across three availability zones.
3. Geo Redundant Storage: Cross-regional replication to protect against region-wide unavailability.
4. Read Access Geo Redundant Storage: across-regional replication with reading access to the replica.

Features of Azure Storage Account

1. The total capacity of an Azure account: 500 TB.
2. A number of tables in an Azure storage account: Limited only by the capacity of the storage account.
3. A number of partitions in a table: Limited only by the capacity of the storage account.
4. A number of entities in a partition: Limited only by the capacity of the storage account.
5. Size of an individual entity: Up to 1 MB with a maximum of 255 properties (including the Partition Key, Row Key, and Timestamp)
6. Size of the Partition Key: A string up to 1 KB in size.
7. Size of the Row Key: A string up to 1 KB in size.
8. Size of an Entity Group Transaction: A transaction can include at most 100 entities and the payload must be less than 4 MB in size.

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