Microsoft Azure Blob Storage : A cloud based object storage solution

Microsoft Azure Storage is a cloud service operate by Microsoft that offers highly affordable, secure, reliable, robust and massively scalable storage. Whether these are images, audios, videos, logs, configuration files, or any data form, data must be store in a manner that is readily accessible, and Microsoft Azure Storage offers solutions for each of these potential use cases. It’s capability to store objects is nearly unlimited. Additionally it uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model that suits your business whether you only store a few hundred GBs or trillions of data. Moreover, it also provides various storage services like, Standard Storage including storage forms of Blob, Table, Queue, and File, and Premium Storage- Azure VM disks.

Microsoft Azure Blob Storage

Generally, the word “Blob” originates from databases, where you can store a huge binary object (file) in a database. Microsoft Azure Blob Storage is design to store large unstructured amounts of data along with their meta-data. Thus, files can be store, at very low cost, in containers (folders). Where you can store any number of Blob files up to 500 TB in size. Each Blob has a size of 2GB. You may also use Blob storage for data backup.

Why Use Blob Storage?

Most of what data users do with storage is about managing unstructured data like logs, files, images, videos, etc. Blob storage  is a way to solve the difficulty of needing to deploy various database systems for various types of data. This provides users with good data consistency, storage and access flexibility that fits the user’s needs, and also provides high availability through geo-replication implementation.

Blob Storage Resources

Storage Account : Under this account, each object you store has an address that contains your unique account name. And it also forms the object’s base address by combining account name and azure storage blob endpoints in your storage account.

In addition, it also provides three types of tiers which are selected, at the creation’s time of storage account :

• Hot Access Tier : The Hot access tier is the most optimized for the frequently accessed data. It also provides the lower cost of access (read-write), but the higher cost of storage.
• Cool Access Tier : This alternative is ideally suited for cases where data is stored for at least 30 days, and for infrequently access data. This tier also provides lower cost of storage and higher cost of access.
• Archive Access Tier : This is design for infrequent access data. It is intended for use in cases where data is kept for more than 180 days.

Container : In a file system, a container organizes a set of blobs, similar to a directory. A storage account can contain an infinite number of containers, and a container can store infinite blobs.

Blobs : Blobs refers to every type of data object. Furthermore, Azure storage supports three blob types:

• Block Blobs : Block Blobs consists of data blocks that can be individually managed. And also, it stores text and binary data upto 4.7 Tb.
• Append Blobs : They are composed of blocks such as block Blob, but design for append operations. Append Blobs are ideal for cases like virtual machine data logging.
• Page Blobs : Generally, It stores upto 8 TB of random access files. For virtual azure machines, virtual hard drive (VHD) files and servers are store as disks by page Blobs.

Free Tier of Azure Blob Storage

You get all of this with your Free Azure Account — and you won’t be paid until you want to upgrade.

• Firstly, Free tier for 12 months.
• Secondly, Rs.4,500 credit for any azure service for 30 days.
• And last, more than 25 services are always free.

Azure Free Services For 12 month period:

For further information, just click the link.

Pricing of Azure Blob Storage

Data storage prices as per pay-as-you-go :

Similarly, to get more information about the pricing policies for reserved category, Operations and Data Transfer prices, Change Feed prices, Data transfer prices for block blobs (per GB), tap the link.

For further details regarding the pricing of available storage services, please visit the page.

Conclusion

As a result Azure Blob Storage service is a well-designed architecture that suits various use cases and business needs. Moreover, it comes with various useful features including geo-redundancy, scalability at the cloud level, and control of granular accesses. It also provides three different types of blobs for data storage and workload management. Therefore, it can be an efficient storage service that stores massive amounts of data from anywhere in the world at high availability and accessibility.

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