Exploring Azure Blob Storage Tiers

Alagunila Meganathan
May 07, 2024

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Introduction

This article will help you learn the process of creating an Azure Blob Storage account.

This article will cover the following.

Brief Concepts of Blob Tiers
Types of Blob Tiers
Change tiers in the Azure portal

Before reading this article, please go through some important articles mentioned below.

Azure Storage

Azure Storage is one of the cloud computing PaaS (Platform as a Service) services provided by the Microsoft Azure team. It provides cloud storage that is highly available, secure, durable, scalable, and redundant. It is massively scalable and elastic. It can store and process hundreds of terabytes of data or you can store the small amounts of data required for a small business website.

Here, we will see how to create a Storage Account.

Access tiers for Azure Blob Storage

Azure storage offers different access tiers, which allow you to store object data in the most cost-effective manner.

The available access tiers include.

Hot: Optimized for storing data that is accessed frequently.
Cool: Optimized for storing data that is infrequently accessed and stored for at least 30 days.
Archive: Optimized for storing data that is rarely accessed and stored for at least 180 days with flexible latency requirements (on the order of hours).

General Purpose v1 (GPv1) accounts don't support tiering. We have to convert our account to a General Purpose v2 (GPv2) account if we need to perform any changes to the tiers.

Hot Tier

When we mark the blob files as Hot it means we want these files readily accessible. The Data stored in the hot tier are always readily available to use. That is read or written very often.

Cool Tier

This storage tier is suitable for data that is not accessed frequently by applications. Let’s take an example of a file that summarizes your system performance once a month and stores it. These types of files you want to access once in a while.

Archive Tier

As the name indicates, this archive tier is intended to be used to store rarely accessed or archival data. Its storage rate is the cheapest on Azure, but the data retrieval charges are the highest.

Create the Blob Storage in the Azure Portal

Prerequisites

Microsoft Azure Account.

Follow the below steps to create an Azure Storage Account.

Step 1. Log in here. Please go through the article mentioned below for creating a Storage account mentioned below.

A Detailed Overview Of Azure Storage Account Creation

After creating the storage account, navigate to the blobs.

Blobs

Step 2. Create Container

Step 3. Create Blob

Here is the dashboard of Azure Blob Storage. Since this container is new, it won't yet contain any blobs. Now Select the Upload button to upload a blob to the container

Browse your local file system to find a file to upload as a block blob, and select Upload. And also Click on the "Advanced" tab to choose the type.
- Authentication type: Azure Storage supports authentication for the Blob services. Use shared access signatures (SAS) to grant fine-grained access to resources in your storage account.
- Blob Type: Choose your blob type.
- Block Size: It starts from 64 KB to 100 MB.
- Upload to the folder: Here, you can upload the folder.
Blob getting uploaded

Step 5

Blob uploaded
Blob dashboard overview - It contains the image URL, type, size, etc. Copy the URL and paste it on the address tab.

Step 6. Click on Change tier to change the tier. We have 3 tiers: hot, cool, and archive.

Change tier

Step 7. Now, change the hot tier to the archive tier. While changing to the archive tier, you will get a warning message telling you that the blob will be inaccessible until it is rehydrated back to a Hot or Cool tier and the process could take several hours. Click on “Save” to switch the tier.

Save