All the applications require data and data storage mechanism.For example most of the applications store data in the database.It is the same for cloud applications.Cloud applications need some location to store the data.
Azure Storage is a cloud service for storing and retrieving data.Azure Storage Account is required for working with Azure Storage.There are two types of Storage Accounts:
- General Purpose Storage Account provides capability of working with blob,tables,queues and files.
- Blob Storage Account provides capability of working with only blobs.
Cloud applications need the following characteristics for data storage:
- Scalable Data store should be able to store large amounts of data(terrabytes or big data) or small amounts of data
- Elastic It should be able to support amounts of data and requests for data
- Accessibility It can be accessed from any device,from any location and from any type of application
Azure storage supports following types of services:
- BLOB storage is binary large objects.This includes unstructured data or files such as audio or video files.This can be of 3 types:
- Block
- Append
- Page
- Table Storage For structured data ,this is a NoSQL,Key-Value storage.This provides fast access to data.
- Queue Storage For messaging and communication across different components.
- File Storage Shared storage like a file server,using SMB protocol.
For accessing these services you should have Storage account in your Azure subscription.
For creating a storage account follow the below steps:
- Login to the azure portal.
- Click on create a resource.
- Select storage category from the list
- Select storage account
A new form consisting of the following values will be displayed:
If you expand the Account kind dropdown you will see the following options:
Depending upon your requirement you can select the appropriate option.
Replication is used to determine the availability of the data as per the requirement.They effect in which data centers your data is stored.
Once the storage account is created you can see the following options in it:
