Azure Storage Solutions

Hi Friends,

In this section, we are going to talk about azure storage solutions. Let’s get started.

First of all in all services, we will go and search for storage accounts as shown below.

I already have couple of.
But, let’s create from scratch and see how it works. I will click on Add button. This will give me below UI. UI is pretty much the similar to virtual machine.

The difference between standard and premium is; Standard storage is physical storage account which is magnetic storage. Basically Hard disk drive (HDD).
Premium storage account on the hand is solid state disk (SSD). In case, If I choose premium storage, then it will significantly reduce supported types like shown below.

In case, of standard, general purpose storage is meant for

General Purpose storage will provide storage for blobs, tables, files and queues in a unified account. More details related to same can be found here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-account-create?tabs=azure-portal
Let’s say, if we go with blob storage account. In that case, biggest advantage is, it can be made public. Therefore, we can turn this on as public on and start storing files in azure which we can share in our web applications. Here, images, videos etc can be stored in blob account.
Replication looks like

Here, based on the location, this drop-down options varies.
Locally-redundant storage (LRS) means it stores your data plus two additional copies within the region. This to me takes advantgae of availability zones. Availability zones allows us to create VMs in specfic data centers.
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) replicates your data synchronously across three storage clusters in a single region. Each storage cluster is physically separated from the others and is located in its own availability zone (AZ).
Geo-redundant storage (GRS) replicates your data to another data center in a secondary region, but that data is available to be read only if Microsoft initiates a failover from the primary to secondary region.
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) maximizes availability for your storage account. RA-GRS provides read-only access to the data in the secondary location, in addition to geo-replication across two regions.
Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS) (preview) marries the high availability of zone-redundant storage (ZRS) with protection from regional outages as provided by geo-redundant storage (GRS). Data in a GZRS storage account is replicated across three Azure availability zones in the primary region and also replicated to a secondary geographic region for protection from regional disasters.
You can optionally enable read access to data in the secondary region with read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA-GZRS) if your applications need to be able to read data in the event of a disaster in the primary region.
Access Tiers is divided into two like Hot and cold storage. Hot storage is immediately available. It means if you have stored something in account, it should have the lowest latency time in terms of retrieval. If we choose cold storage, its actually cheaper option when we consider price per giga byte. But, here latency time is high.
Let’s say, if you have got data, which you don’t need to access frequently, like archival data or backup data; then you should go for cold storage.

In case if I select second option like shown below

Then, I have to set up networking. This is also called virtual network service endpoints at other places.
This will turn off the public access. Even if you have access keys and if you are outside of this virtual network, then you won’t be able to access the same.
You can use network security group to secure the network like if you need VNet peering or Global VNet peering.
Hence, this is adding extra security layer to your storage account.
I Have kept the default settings

Here is the final summary page.

And, it has created me

Currently, at the time of writing, this is preview feature only. In the next section, we will delve further and see how to configure different endpoint related settings. Till then stay tuned and happy coding.

Thanks,
Rahul Sahay
Happy Coding