Introduction to Blob Storage in Azure

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What is Blob Storage?

Blob storage helps us stop unstructured data in Azure, we can determine the level of access (Read Only, Read Write) or the way of accessing it.
The type of data you want to store, the size of the data and the frequency at which you want to access your data determines the storage type you use.
When creating a storage there are two options for the type of storage account

1. The General Purpose V2 account – This is a storage type used when you have multiple scenario you want to use your storage for and do not require low latency i.e. It is not too important fast the user accesses the file. Used for the typical storage scenario for storing images, videos, documents etc.
   General Purpose gives you access to the different type of storage too, file share, Container, Queues and Tables

2. The Premium Storage Account – If you are looking for very low latency and you know exactly what you want to do with your storage account, then premium storage is your best bet, here you have to select how you want to use your storage account. There is an option when creating that asks you to specify the type of storage you want to use. I would explain this now.

Depending on your use case there are different type of storage

1. Block Blobs – This is used for storing files (Text or Binary). It is use where is no frequent changes made to the files stored, it is used to uploading and downloading large files efficiently too.
2. Append Blob – This is used for storing files that require changes to be made, an example is log files. Append here means add to a file, and this storage type is optimized for this, makes it easy and very fast.
3. Page Blob – This is used in a scenario where there is a lot of read / write operation, it is used in Azure as the disk for Virtual Machine, it helps with reading and writing to disk quickly and efficiently.

Another case to consider when creating your Azure storage account is how frequently this files would be accessed, when creating your storage you have only two options – Hot or Cold Storage and this option appears only when creating a General-purpose v2 Storage account.

Here are the different storage tiers

1. Hot Storage – this is used when the files are going to be access frequently and/or modified frequently too, this is a more expensive alternative
2. Cold Storage – If you rarely access your data stored, then this would be your better alternative because it is cheaper to buy but expensive to access.
3. Archive Storage – This is used for file you do not need access to at all but want to save them, nobody can access them until they are unarchived.

I hope from this article you have learned about the options you have in azure and have useful information when creating your next storage account

Thank you for reading my article.

References

1. Hot, Cool, and Archive access tiers for blob data - Azure Storage | Microsoft Docs
2. Introduction to Blob (object) storage - Azure Storage | Microsoft Docs