Explain types of storage in windows azure.
Azure Storage Types
With an Azure Storage account, you can choose from two kinds of storage
services: Standard Storage which includes Blob, Table, Queue, and File storage types, and Premium Storage – Azure VM disks.
Standard Storage account
With a Standard Storage Account, a user gets access to Blob Storage, Table Storage, File Storage, and Queue storage. Let’s explain those just a bit better.
Azure Blob Storage
Blog Storage is basically storage for unstructured data that can include pictures, videos, music files, documents, raw data, and log data…along with their meta-data. Blobs are stored in a directory-like structure called a “container”. If you are familiar with AWS S3, containers work much the same way as S3 buckets. You can store any number of blob files up to a total size of 500 TB and, like S3, you can also apply security policies. Blob storage can also be used for data or device backup.
Blob Storage service comes with three types of blobs: block blobs, append blobs and page blobs. You can use block blobs for documents, image files, and video file storage. Append blobs are similar to block blobs, but are more often used for append operations like logging. Page blobs are used for objects meant for frequent read-write operations. Page blobs are therefore used in Azure VMs to store OS and data disks.
To access a blob from storage, the URI should be:
http://<storage-account-name>.blob.core.windows.net/<container-name>/<blob-name> For example, to access a movie called RIO from the bluesky container of an account called carlos, request:
http://carlos.blob.core.windows.net/ bluesky/RIO.avi Note that container names are always in lower case.
Azure Table Storage
Table storage, as the name indicates, is preferred for tabular data, which is ideal for key-value NoSQL data storage. Table Storage is massively scalable and extremely easy to use. Like other NoSQL data stores, it is schema-less and accessed via a REST API. A query to table storage might look like this:
http://<storage account>.table.core.windows.net/<table>
Azure File Storage
Azure File Storage is meant for legacy applications. Azure VMs and services share their data via mounted file shares, while on-premise applications access the files using the File Service REST API. Azure File Storage offers file shares in the cloud using the standard SMB protocol and supports both SMB 3.0 and SMB 2.1.
Azure Queue Storage
The Queue Storage service is used to exchange messages between components either in the cloud or on-premise (compare to Amazon’s SQS). You can store large numbers of messages to be shared between independent components of applications and communicated asynchronously via HTTP or HTTPS. Typical use cases of Queue Storage include processing backlog messages or exchanging messages between Azure Web roles and Worker roles.
A query to Queue Storage might look like this: http://<account>.queue.core.windows.net/<file_to_download>
Premium Storage account:
The Azure Premium Storage service is the most recent storage offering from Microsoft, in which data are stored in Solid State Drives (SSDs) for better IO and throughput. Premium storage only supports Page Blobs.
