Brief About Windows Azure Storage

Microsoft introduced Windows Azure because user can access highly accessible service on demand. It provides the application service on demand. It is very scalable and durable. As we all know every application require space where the data of the application can be stored.



So, Windows Azure has come up with Azure Storage. So, using the Azure Storage, you can create highly scalable applications which supports different types of data. In Windows Azure Storage, we can store hundreds of terabytes [TB] data. It supports multimedia data, files, documents, etc.

It is very elastic; it means you can increase the storage as per your requirement. Azure Storage increase the storage capacity if your application required more space and as well as decrease the storage capacity if application require low storage.

One more thing you get benefit to Windows Azure Storage, Actually you need to pay only which is used by you and when it is used. If you are using more storage then you need to pay more and if you are using small amount of data to store then you need to pay only small.

You can find the pricing details from here.



To use the Azure Storage, you just need to have an Azure Storage Account. Using this account you can access the service of the Azure Storage. Actually Azure Storage provides two types of the storage account.

1. Standard Storage Account: It is for Blob, Table, and Queue Storage.
2. Premium Storage Account: It is for Azure Virtual Machine Disks Only.

So, as per our storage account we can store the different kinds of data on Azure Storage.



BLOB STORAGE

It can store any type of data, data can be a document file, media file, exe or dll, images, text file or any other data file. So, basically it is used for storing the objects. So, as the definition says, we can store large amount of the unstructured data into the blob storage.

Blob data is stored into a container, so we can use large number of containers for storing large number of the blob data. Container provides the security from the outer world to protect our data.



TABLE STORAGE

It is like a table inside the SQL Server. So, it is used to store the structured data. Table storage is a NoSQL key-attribute data store. It means every data stored into the table is stored with typed property name. It is very fast when you are working with large number of data. It doesn’t use schema for developing the table.



QUEUE STORAGE

Sometimes, it is required to transfer the data in the format of the message over the internet between the two cloud services. In that scenario we prefer to use the queue storage. You can create large number of the queues to process your data. Every queue contains large number of the message and every message size may be up to 64 KB.



Thanks for reading this article, hope you enjoyed it.