Introduction to Azure Blob storage

In this article, we are reading about “Introduction to Azure Blob storage”.
Azure Blob storage is Microsoft’s object storage solution for the cloud. Blob storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data. Unstructured data is data that does not adhere to a particular data model or definition, such as text or binary data.

About Blob storage

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.
Users or client applications can access objects in Blob storage via HTTP/HTTPS, from anywhere in the world. Objects in Blob storage are accessible via the Azure Storage REST API, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, or an Azure Storage client library. Client libraries are available for a variety of languages, including .NET, Java, Node.js, Python, Go, PHP, and Ruby.

About Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2

Blob storage supports Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Microsoft’s enterprise big data analytics solution for the cloud. Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 offers a hierarchical file system as well as the advantages of Blob storage, including low-cost, tiered storage; high availability; strong consistency; and disaster recovery capabilities.

Blob storage resources

Blob storage offers three types of resources:
  • The storage account.
  • A container in the storage account
  • A blob in a container
The following diagram shows the relationship between these resources.

Introduction to Azure Blob storage

Storage accounts

A storage account provides a unique namespace in Azure for your data. Every object that you store in Azure Storage has an address that includes your unique account name. The combination of the account name and the Azure Storage service endpoint forms the endpoints for your storage account.
For example, if your storage account is named my storage account, then the default endpoint for Blob storage is:
1
http://mystorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net
To create a storage account, see Create a storage account.

Containers

A container organizes a set of blobs, similar to a directory in a file system. A storage account can include an unlimited number of containers, and a container can store an unlimited number of blobs.
Note
The container name must be lowercase. For more information about naming containers, see Naming and Referencing Containers, Blobs, and Metadata.

Blobs

In Introduction to Azure Blob storage, Azure Storage supports three types of blobs:
  • Block blobs store text and binary data, up to about 4.7 TB. Block blobs are made up of blocks of data that can be managed individually.
  • Append blobs are made up of blocks like block blobs but are optimized for append operations. Append blobs are ideal for scenarios such as logging data from virtual machines.
  • Page blobs store random access files up to 8 TB in size. Page blobs store the virtual hard drive (VHD) files serve as disks for Azure virtual machines. For more information about page blobs, see (../articles/storage/blobs/storage-blob-page blob-overview.md)

Move data to Blob storage

A number of solutions exist for migrating existing data to Blob storage:
  • AzCopy is an easy-to-use command-line tool for Windows and Linux that copies data to and from Blob storage, across containers, or across storage accounts.
  • The Azure Storage Data Movement library is a .NET library for moving data between Azure Storage services. The AzCopy utility is built with the Data Movement library.
  • Azure Data Factory supports copying data to and from Blob storage by using the account key, shared access signature, service principal, or managed identities for Azure resources authentications.
  • Blobfuse is a virtual file system driver for Azure Blob storage. You can use blob use to access your existing block blob data in your Storage account through the Linux file system.
  • Azure Data Box Disk is a service for transferring on-premises data to Blob storage when large datasets or network constraints make uploading data over the wire unrealistic. You can use 
    Azure Data Box Disk
     to request solid-state disks (SSDs) from Microsoft. You can then copy your data to those disks and ship them back to Microsoft to be uploaded into Blob storage.
  • The Azure Import/Export service provides a way to export large amounts of data from your storage account to hard drives that you provide and that Microsoft then ships back to you with your data.
So in this article we have read about “Introduction to Azure Blob storage”.

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