Azure storage services
Azure provides a range of storage services to cater to many differing storage solution needs, each providing different capabilities and features to best match their intended purpose and usage pattern.
You must understand the following Azure storage services since they are outlined in the Describe Core Azure Services exam:
- Storage accounts, tiers, and replication
- Data stores
- Disk, file, and container (Blob) storage
The content in this section will take your knowledge beyond the exam’s objectives so that you are prepared for a real-world, day-to-day Azure-focused role. In the next section, we will look at storage accounts.
Storage accounts
Storage accounts are resources that need to be created to store your data objects; they can be thought of as control panels for your data stores and provide management pane resources.
From a storage account, you can view all your different storage objects, configure security and network settings, perform data management and monitoring, diagnose problems, move and migrate data, apply governance controls such as Azure Advisor recommendations, view activity logs and events, and control access through authentication and authorization.
The different data storage types are categorized into containers, file shares, queues, and tables. Only containers and file shares are part of the exam objectives (at the time of writing); we have only mentioned the other storage types for completeness and so that you can study them, should you wish to.
There are two performance options we can use to create storage accounts, these are Standard and Premium. Premium is recommended for low-latency requirement scenarios, such as sharing user profiles for the Virtual Desktop service, for example.
A storage account also provides a unique namespace (also referred to as an endpoint) for each data object so that each storage account can be addressed uniquely.
The unique identifier for a storage object is constructed in the format of https://<storage account name>.<service name>.core.windows.net.
The following are the endpoints of each of the Azure storage services:
- Blob storage: https://<storage-account>.blob.core.windows.net
- Data Lake Storage Gen2: https://<storage-account>.dfs.core.windows.net
- Azure Files: https://<storage-account>.file.core.windows.net
- Queue storage: https://<storage-account>.queue.core.windows.net
- Table storage: https://<storage-account>.table.core.windows.net
It is also important to understand the following storage service limits (at the time of writing):
- Number of storage accounts per region, per subscription: 250
- Maximum storage account capacity: 5 PiB
- Maximum number of containers, Blobs, file shares, tables, queues, entities, or messages per Storage account: No limit
- Maximum request rate per Storage account: 20,000 requests per second
- Maximum ingress per Storage account (US/Europe regions): 10 Gbps
- Maximum ingress per Storage account (regions other than the US and Europe): 5 Gbps
- Maximum egress for general-purpose v2 and Blob storage accounts (all regions): 50 Gbps
Higher limits for ingress are supported if you send a request to Microsoft regarding increasing your account limits.
This section looked at storage accounts. In the next section, we will look at storage tiers.
