Azure Storage

Storage is one of the foundational technologies on which much of what Azure has to offer today, eg a VM instance needs a virtual disk to store data

Azure Storage Account is the general-purpose storage account that supports most of the common storage solutions

• Blobs
• Tables
• Queues
• Files

Azure Data Lake is a huge data storage where we have petabytes of data and where a lot of data processing can be done. It’s one of the cheapest types of storage, which costs ~1.8 cents per GB

Storage Accounts have many options:

• Access Tiers - Hot, Cool, Archive
• Performance Tiers - Standard or Premium
• Location
• Redundancy / Replication
• Failover option

There are many Disk Storage options:

• Managed Disks
• Azure Virtual Machine Disks
• Reserve Capacity in Advance
• Optimize to Virtual Hard Disks

In a managed disk we reserve the drive capacity in advance and pay for it, based on the tier, whereas in the unmanaged disk, we pay per gigabyte used.

BLOB ( Binary Large Object)

A BLOB is a backronym for “Binary Large Object”, A collection of binary data. That binary data could be in the form of a file(stored in a storage account) or data stored in a database.

AzCopy( Azure Copy)

AzCopy is a CLI(Command line Interface) tool that helps us copy to and from a storage account, it can also download files to the local machine or upload the data from the local machine. It routes the data/traffic through the Microsoft network rather than the internet, it can be used via the cloud shell or install the CLI tool on the OS.

Azure File Sync

These are the files that are in the cloud and accessible by the user to any pc they’re connected to, Azure File Share adds the additional capabilities of cloud-based storage which can be used along with existing Local Shares.

• uses the SMB 3.1.1 protocol
• uses NTLM v2 authentication
• uses AES-128-GCM encryption

Azure Storage Sync Service

These are Sync services provided by Azure to companies where they want the device data to be backed-up/synced.

• it is in the same region as file-server
• organized into sync groups
• sync groups contain server endpoints

On the device side, we install the Azure File Sync Agent which connects with Storage Sync.

Azure Migrate

It is a service that is provided by Azure to migrate from on-prem/other cloud providers to Azure Cloud in a seamless way, it is a guided process to make it very easy to switch to the Azure cloud. It also notifies the user of the services that need to be upgraded before starting the migration so that all the data is in a common format during the entire process, this is only when the current application version of the user is not supported by Azure

Azure Data Box

Azure Data Box Service is used when large amounts of data has to be transferred to the Azure Cloud, for example sending 10TB of data over the internet is a very bad idea and even while using the express route, it becomes very costly, to tackle this problem Azure sends the user a disk(8TB), or a JBOD( Just a Bunch of Disks)(1PB), on which we dump our data and ship it back to azure, where they take the data from the storage device and upload it to our subscribed storage service.