Azure Storage Account

In this article, we’ll learn about Azure Storage account and go through a step-by-step tutorial to setup the Azure Storage account. This would be a pre-requisite for numerous articles such as the Azure Event Grid Series. Here, we’ll discuss Azure Storage and its different types of storage accounts, its benefits, use case scenarios, and applications.  

Azure Storage Account  

The Azure Storage account holds all the data objects in Azure which can include tables, queues, files, blob along with disks. A unique namespace is provided for the data in the Azure Storage making it accessible from across the globe through HTTPS and HTTP. The data in Azure Storage are supported with high availability, security, and hugely efficient scalability.  

Storage Account Types in Azure 

Azure Storage supports numerous kinds of storage accounts. Every different storage account has its own unique features and price models. The four different types of storage accounts in Azure is listed as follows.  

Standard General Purpose v2

The Standard General Purpose v2 supports Blob Storage which includes Azure Files, Table Storage, Queue and the Data Lake Storage and provides redundancy option for Locally Redundant Storage (LRS), Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS) as well as Zone-redundant storage (ZRS). The Zone-redundant storage also supports the geo-zone redundant storage (GZRS) along with read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA-GZRS). This is basically as the name says itself the most standard account for storage of blobs, tables and queues.  

Premium Block Blobs

The premium block blob only supports the Blob Storage which includes support for the Data Lake Storage with LRS and ZRS redundancy options. This storage account is most suited for use cases requiring high rates for transaction or ones that need low storage latency consistently.  

Premium Page Blobs

This storage accounts are strictly for page blobs alone and only supports the Locally Redundant Storage (LRS).  

Premium Files Shares

The premium files shares support the Azure Files and LRS and ZRS redundancy options. This is mainly used for file sharing and is suitable for applications which are of high performance and requires better scalability. It is highly recommended for enterprises level applications. It basically supports NFS file sharing as well as Server Message Block (SMB).  

Let us learn to setup the Azure Storage account.  

Step 1 

Login to the Azure portal. The welcome page would look similar to the one shown here.  

Step 2 

Click on the Create a resource button.  

Step 3 

Here, on the search bar, search for storage account.  

Step 4 

As the options are resulted, select the Storage Account offering.  

Step 5 

We are now taken to the Storage account page. Under the Plan, select Storage Account and click on Create.  

Step 6 

Under the Project details, select the Resource Group. Create a new one if you don’t have one yet.  

Step 7 

Under the Instance details, name your storage account. Select the Region. Under performance, select the Standard and Locally-redundant storage (LRS) under redundancy.  

Once, all the details are filled, click on Review + Create.  

Step 8 

As the validation is passed, select Create.  

Step 9 

The deployment will initialize and we are notified about it.  

Step 10 

As the deployment is complete, we are provided with the link to check the service setup through “Go to resource”. 

Here on the Storage Service page, we can see, the storage account has been created under the name ‘ojashstorage’ with Standard performance and the location as well as Replication details of the setup. We can see, the Provision state dictates Succeeded.  

With this, we’ve successfully created a Storage account in Azure.  

Conclusion 

Thus, we learned about Azure Storage account and then went through a step-by-step process to setup a storage account in Azure. The storage account is essential for numerous of other services to be utilized in Azure. Moreover, the storage account enables number of use cases for other on-premises services to be integrated too. This will come handy in large quantity of work we’ll do over the years as a software engineer. Data is a heart of any application; may it be a web app or machine learning applications. Azure Storage Account is the location to manage those data and it value and need is tremendous.