Azure Storage: Why we should make the move

4 min readApr 6, 2020

As we all know storage is a process of saving digital data to a device by computing Technology. Storage mechanism that enables a computer to retain data, either temporarily or permanently.

Challenge:

This is not a new concept as it has lasted since the computer has been invented. But what is becoming the challenge nowadays is the massive volume of the data and access to these data are increasing every minute, and the importance of these data is very vital. These scenarios can be understood well with the statistics and the phrase below.

Statistics: “The capacity of the world to exchange and generate information has increased from 0.3 Exabyte in 1986 to 2.3 Trillion Gigabytes/day of data in 2015.”

Phrase: “We swim in a sea of data, and the sea level is rising rapidly.’’ (sourced)

How can we solve this challenge:

Here comes Azure Storage.

Azure Storage is Microsoft’s managed service providing cloud storage solution created recently to solve these for modern data storage scenarios.

Azure Storage is highly available, durable, scalable, secure, and redundant. Since it has been built to overcome handle massive volumes and structures of data Azure Storage offers various and versatile services as solutions for every individual scenario.

Azure Storage services:

The data services of the azure storage include the following services:

• Massively scalable object store for data objects

• File system service for the cloud

• Messaging store for reliable messaging

• NoSQL store

Azure Storage types:

These services can be achieved with various storage options available in Azure Storage, they are Azure Blobs.

Azure Blobs:

Azure Blobs service is a massively scalable object store for text and binary data. BLOB is the acronym for Binary Large OBject which is a collection of binary data stored as a single entity in a database management system. These Blobs can be any of the types like images, audio, multimedia objects, or even binary executable code.

Azure Files:

Azure Files service is a managed file share for cloud or on-premises deployments. Azure Files enables us to set up highly available network file shares that can be accessed by using the standard Server Message Block protocol. So, multiple VMs can share the same files with access permissions to read and write to the file. We can also read the files using techniques like the REST interface and the storage client libraries.

Azure Queues:

Azure Queues service is a messaging store for reliable messaging between application components. The major operations performed using the azure queues are storing and retrieving messages. In general, a queue can hold and process millions of messages. Queues can process asynchronous messages stored in it.

Azure Tables:

Azure Tables service is a NoSQL store for schemaless storage of structured data. The service stores structured NoSQL data in the cloud, in the key-value format without any concept of schema design. Hence it doesn’t have any schema. This is easy and flexible for adapting our data for the application’s own needs.

Major advantages:

• Azure Storage has the main advantages as durable and highly available

• Redundancy ensures our data is safe in the event of transient hardware failures. We can configure data replication across various data centers and various geographical regions for furthermore prevention mechanisms in any natural disaster scenarios. Data replication helps to achieve high availability in any sudden failures

• The security of the Azure Storage is achieved through a powerful encryption mechanism by which all the data are securely encrypted. Azure Storage also provides us the control to monitor any data access by others

• Azure Storage is designed to be massively scalable by considering the necessity of present and future requirements to data and application performance.

• Microsoft Azure handles and manages hardware maintenance, updates, and critical issues

• Data in Azure Storage are easily accessible over HTTP’s protocol. Microsoft provides software development kits for Azure Storage in many of the programming languages including .NET, Java, Python, PHP, Node.js, Ruby, Go, etc. It also provides us to access with REST API, and through scripting in Azure PowerShell and Azure CLI. We can also use the Azure portal and Azure Storage Explorer provided with simple visual solutions for working with data

• The payment scheme allows us to pay based on our usage