Azure Storage Building Blocks

The core element of Azure storage is the Azure Storage Account, which may be best described as the administrative container that houses various Azure storage services. Here’s a breakdown of core storage services housed within an Azure Storage account:

The core component is the Azure Storage Account, which can best be described as an administrative container holding a few azure storage services. Below is a break-down of the core storage services stored in an Azure Storage account:

1. Azure Blob Storage

It serves to store unstructured data such as media files, documents, and any other large binary data.

Applications: High-scale large data storage applications that scale; for example, backups or media streaming.

2. Azure File Storage

What is it used for? It allows file sharing across several virtual machines.

How to use it?

It is used in making a file share accessible to different virtual machines to exchange data seamlessly across the virtual machines in the same or different networks

3. Archive Storage

Use Cases: For storing data whose access infrequently costs less

Use cases include storing files or blobs that are less frequently accessed, which would bring lower prices. When retrieval from an archive will be significantly longer than other storage options.

4. Azure Queue Storage

Purpose: Message queues, which allow components to communicate.

Usage: Best for handling requests or messages asynchronously or example of an order stored in a queue for later processing.

5. Azure Table Storage

Objective: NoSQL storage intended for structured and non-relational data.

Usage: Suitable for applications that require fast access to vast amounts of data and do not impose the schema traditional SQL tables do.

Other Storage Services

6. Azure Disk Storage

Objective: It’s meant to be the OS, as well as other data disks powering virtual machines.

Usage : This is where any OS disk attached to a VM is stored as a .vhd file, which can also store images of OS disks.

7. Azure StorSimple

Purpose : Storage at the SAN (Storage Area Network) level, it is a hybrid cloud.

Usage : Organizations that use Azure in DR or who are integrating data both on-premise and in Azure for scalable storage solutions benefit by this.

8. Azure Site Recovery

Purpose: It is a disaster recovery service that replicates workloads of on-premises in Azure.

Usage: It replicates data-center workload, which enables quick building from the most recent on-premises image in case of a failure.

9. Data Box

Purpose: Off-line bulk data transfer of big data

Usage: In transferring large-scale datasets, for example, in terabytes, the data is loaded onto Data Box, which Microsoft then loads into Azure

10. Azure Backup

Objective: Virtual machine disks are backed up into a recovery services vault.

Usage: This gives safe back up for VM disks in case the recovery of the data is required, this feature does not use storage accounts in order to store the images of the disk.

11. Azure Monitor

Objective: Monitor the Azure resources with choices of basic monitoring and analytics.

Usage: You can create alerts monitor service metrics and parse logs. As an example, you could configure an alert for the instance, where a file share is reaching close to quota.

12. Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Purpose: Reduce latency content delivery by reducing the number of requests from users to data in storage accounts.

It also caches data near users, thus improving speed of access to huge files or media and reducing latency in accessing them.