Azure Blob Storage

In this article, we’ll learn about Azure Blob storage and go through a step-by-step tutorial to create a storage account in Azure for use of different projects.  

Azure Blob Storage 

Azure Blob Storage is designed by Microsoft for the process of object storage in cloud. The blob storage has the capacity to store huge amount of data, majorly the unstructured data. When we talk about the unstructured data it basically means that the data doesn’t follow or are setup in any particular model and definition like binary data and text.  

Usage of the Blob Storage 

The Azure Blob Storage can be used for multitudes of purposes. From storing files with the goal of distributed access, serving documents, images straightly to the browser and streaming of audio and video – the Azure blob storage can be used for it all, Moreover, Azure Blob Storage also is a major functionality offered by Azure for backup storage focused for business continuity and disaster recovery. You can learn more about it in the following article, Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery In Azure. Furthermore, data can be stored from on-premises and with hosted services in Azure for analysis in the Blob Storage.  

Resources 

The Azure Blob mainly stores three basic types of resources. They can be understood in terms of Storage Accounts, Container, and Blob itself.  

The Account storage consists of the unique namespace for objects with the unique account name. The container, on the other hand, focuses on the organization of different set of blobs just like the directory in file system. Unlimited number of containers can be included in the specific account storage. Now, this container can contain unlimited number of blobs which is the third type of resource. This blob supports block blobs for binary data and text, append blob for logging of data for virtual machine and page blob with access to files upto the size of 8TiB.  

Now, let us learn to setup a storage account to use blob storage for any projects.  

Step 1 

Login to Azure Portal. You’ll be taken to the welcome page similar to the one below.  

Step 2 

Now, expand the Menu tab on the top left. Now, click on Storage accounts.  

Step 3 

Next, you’ll be taken to the storage accounts page. Here, click on Create.  

Step 4 

We’ll be given the form to fill in the details of the project and instance.  

Here, setup your resource group. I’ve created my ojash-rg.  

Next, name your storage account name and select the region where you want to setup this account. Here, I’ve named mine ojashblob and setting up in East US.  

Next, select Standard for the performance if you don’t require low latency. This will help you save some bucks if you don’t have special use case for low latency of data retrieval. For redundancy choose Geo-redundant storage (GRS).  

Tick the Make read access to data available in the event of regional unavailability. This will help in disaster recovery and business continuity as we’ve discussed above.  

Now, click on Next: Advanced.  

Step 5 

Under advanced tick in the settings in the security I’ve done for default. Since, we aren’t using big analytics workloads right now, we’ve kept the enable hierarchical namespace unticked for faster setup. This when selected will only then access the SFTP and NFS v3 for Blob storage. 

For the access tier, we are using Hot.  

Next, select Networking tab.  

Step 6 

Enable public access from all networks as we want to allow connection to the storage publicly in future usage and under the routing reference choose Microsoft Network Routing.  

Step 7 

For Data Protection, enable soft delete for blob, containers, and file shares. Choose other settings accordingly.  

Step 8 

Now, under Encryption, we’ll select Microsoft-managed key (MMK) and enable support for blobs ad file only. 

Once, we do this, we can click on Review + Create.  

Step 9 

The system will check for validation.  

Once the validation is passed, we can click on Create.  

The initialization deployment notification will pop up. 

Step 10 

We can see about the Deployment progress on the overview page.  

Once, the storage account is deployed, we are given the option of visiting the resource.  

Step 11 

Thus, we can finally see that our Storage account has been setup. This storage account will help us storage data objects from blobs, tables, queues and even files and can be accessed publicly or privately using HTTPS and HTTP.  

Conclusion 

Thus, in this article, we learned about Azure Blob Storage and the different uses of the Blob Storage. We then went ahead to learn about the different resources in Azure Blob Storage. Next, we went through a step-by-step tutorial to setup a storage account which can now be used to store blob data for different projects. In the upcoming articles, we’ll explore more about the Blob Storage and various functioning and processes required during different project integration.