Blog > Introduction to Azure Blob Storage
Azure Blob storage is a service for storing many unstructured object data, such as text or binary data. Blob storage can also be used to expose data publicly to the world or store application data privately.
Common uses of Blob storage include:
- Azure blob storage serves images or documents directly to a browser.
- t can also store files for distributed access.
- Storing data for backup and restoring disaster recovery and archiving.
Why Azure Blob Storage
Companies that are using their data effectively are generating a competitive advantage in this era of data. But for most organizations, data comes from many different sources and can quickly create silos. These silos are expensive to store and a challenge to manage as most of the data being generated is unstructured and growing faster.
To stay current organizations, need comprehensive support for unstructured data workloads on a single modern platform here; Azure Blob storage helps store a massive amount of unstructured data inexpensively.
Features of Azure Blob Storage
- Scalable
- Durable
- Highly Secure
- Capable of handling demanding workloads
Azure blobs allow users to meet any capacity requirements, protect data and manage storage with ease. Azure blob allows organizations to store binary and application data, videos, audio files, and text. Blob storage is built from the ground up to support the scale, security, and availability requirements needed by mobile, web, and cloud-native application developers.
Storage Account
Access to Azure storage is done through a storage account. This account can be general-purpose or a Blob storage account.
Storage Containers
- A container provides a grouping of a set of blobs.
- All blobs must be stored in a container.
- An account can contain an unlimited number of blobs.
- A container can store an unlimited number of blobs.
Blob
- A file of any type and size can be stored.
- Azure storage offers three types of blobs.
o Block Blobs Storage
o Page Blobs
o Append Blobs
Azure Storage: Security
- Azure storage provides a comprehensive set of security capabilities.
- The storage account itself can be secured using Role-Based access control and Azure active directory.
- Data can be secured in transit between an application and Azure using Client-Side Encryption, HTTPS, or SMB 3.0.
- Data can be set to be automatically encrypted when written to Azure Disk Encryption.
- Delegated access to the data objects in Azure storage can be granted using shared access signatures.
Types of Azure Blob
Block Blobs
- Each block can be a different size, up to a maximum of 100 MB.
- It is also used for storing text or binary files such as document and media files.
- A single-block blob can contain up to 50,000 blocks. Individual block blobs can be up to 4.75 terabytes (TB) in size (100 MB x 50,000).
- With a block blob, the user can upload multiple blocks in parallel to decrease upload time.
Append Blobs
- Each block in an append blob can be a different size, up to a maximum of 4 MB.
- Append blobs are similar to block blobs in that they are made up of blocks, but they are optimized for append operations, so they are useful for logging scenarios.
- A single append blob can contain up to 50,000 blocks, for a total size of slightly more than 195 GB (4 MB x 50,000).
Page Blob
- Page blobs are a collection of 512-byte pages optimized for random read and write operations.
- It can be up to 8 TB in size and are more efficient for frequent read and write operation.
- Azure virtual machines use page blobs as OS and data disks.
Blob Storage Access Tier
Azure storage provides different options for accessing block blob data based on usage patterns.
Hot: Optimized for frequent access to objects.
Cool: Blob storage allows users to optimize for storing a large amount of data for infrequent access to data and storage for at least 30 days.
Archive: Optimized for data that can tolerate several hours of retrieval latency and remain in the archive tier for at least 180 days.
Author: SVCIT Editorial Copyright
Silicon Valley Cloud IT, LLC.