Author : MD TAREQ HASSAN | Updated : 2020/10/21
Introduction
- Scalable storage for unstructured data
- Microsoft’s object storage solution for the cloud
- A massively scalable object store for text and binary data (i.e. image)
- Optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data
- Allows unstructured data to be stored and accessed at a massive scale
- Supports Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 for enterprise big data analytics solutions
Usage
- Serving images or documents directly to a browser
- Streaming video and audio
- Writing to log files
- Storing raw data
- Storing data for:
- backup and restore
- disaster recovery
- archiving
- Storing data for analysis (to build an enterprise data lake for big data analytics)
Container
- Blobs are stored in a directory-like structure called “container”
- Organizes a set of blobs (similar to folder in a file system)
- Can store unlimited number of blobs (A storage account can include unlimited number of containers)
- Container name must be lowercase
Resources
- A storage account is needed
- A container must be created in the storage account
- Blobs will be created/uploaded to the container
Relationship diagram
Create container
- Prerequisite: Create Azure storage account
- Go to: https://portal.azure.com/#blade/HubsExtension/BrowseResourceGroups
- Select Resource group > Select storage account
- (Left panel) Blob service > Containers > “+ Container”
- Set Name (lowercase, alphanumeric, hyphens only) and public access level
- Create
Change access level
Blob
- Blob = Binary Large OBject
- A large file
- Large multimedia objects
- Examples
- text
- image
- audio
- video
Blob types
- Block blobs:
- made up of blocks of data that can be managed individually
- stores text and binary data
- Size
- each up to 100 MB (limit might be changed by Microsoft)
- Total up to 4.75 TB (limit might be changed by Microsoft)
- Append blobs:
- similar to block blobs but optimized for append operations
- ideal for logging operations (i.e. storing log file from ASP.Ner core, Blazor apps)
- Size
- each up to 4 MB (limit might be changed by Microsoft)
- Total up to 195 TB (limit might be changed by Microsoft)
- Page blobs:
- store random access files (up to 8 TB, limit might be changed by Microsoft)
- store virtual hard drive (VHD)
- serve as disks for Azure virtual machines
- Details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/understanding-block-blobs--append-blobs--and-page-blobs