Azure Storage Flashcards
What types of Storage do Azure Storage Services comprise?
- Container (Blob) Storage (unmanaged storage) / Azure Storage (GPv2)
- Disk Storage - for Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs) (managed storage)
- Azure File Storage
- Storage tiers
- considered as Infrastructure as a Service
Describe Azure Storage?
- also called GPv2
- “standard storage”
- can contain four types of data: Container, File, Queue, Table
- can hold up to 5 Petabytes (PB)
- pay for what you use
- extremely cheap cloud storage, about 2ct per GB per month
- not recommended for high-demand workloads
How are Azure Storage and Data Lake connected?
- when setting up Azure Storage (GPv2) you can choose to turn it into data lake
- data lake is extremely large data storage
- good for “big data” analytics
Describe Premium Storage Options
- Blob storage - can only hold containers (blobs) - can choose block blobs or page blogs
- File storage
- Uses premium SSD (solid state disks)
- Triple the operations per second (OPS)
- lower latency (time to first byte)
- more expensive
What high performance options exist for storage?
- Premium SSD
- Premium SSD v2
- Ultra Disk
What is a blob?
- Binary Large Object (BLOB)
- files of any type (txt, pdf, zip, jpg, …)
- stored loosely in a container
- public or private
- “unstructured data”
Describe Container Storage
- create multiple containers
- each container can contain multiple blobs
- can be organized into folders
- BUT not hierarchical file structure
- pay only what you use
- equal to AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)
How is Location important with Storage?
- can create multiple storage accounts in any region of the world
- keep data close to the person/service consuming it (for access speed reasons)
- price varies by region
How does Azure deal with redundancy?
- Azure keeps 3 copies of your data by default
- Locally- or zone-redundant
- Azure will almost never, ever lose a file once it’s successfully received it
What is global redundancy?
- chooseable for storage
- Azure keeps 6 copies of data
- 3 locally and 3 in another region of the “geo”
- Honors data sorvereignity laws
What Access Tiers exist in Azure?
- Hot: default, balanced access
- Cool: can be set as default, cheaper storage with more expensive read/write operations
- Cold: much cheaper storage, more expensive read/write operations
- Archive: cannot get inmediate access to files, cheapest storage, most expensive operations
What do Access Tiers of Storage describe?
- the balance between of if its cheaper to storage data than to retrieve it or the other way around
What is the concept of Failover in Azure?
- Hard disk fail ever so often
- Azure takes of that
- 3 copies of your data, they can use one of other copies to recreate it
What is Lifecycle management in Azure Storage?
- allows to automate pushing files from hot to cool and from cool to archive based on certain rules
What applications can be used to access a storage account directly/programmaticly?
- Storage Explorer (downloadable Software)
- Storage Browser (in the browser)
How do you copy data between two storage accounts?
multiple ways:
- manually download & upload
- copy data inside Azure Network via CLI tool called AzCopy
What is Azure File Storage?
- true hierarchical structure with folders
- you can “mount” this storage to a server and use a drive letter with it
- supports SMB protocol or NFS (Linux)
Why do we need Azure Files?
- Replace or supplement your on-prem file storage
- Lift and shift migration to the cloud
- adds redundancy, data recovery, failover benefits
What is Azure File Sync?
- Hybrid option - on prem files with cloud option
- Cloud tiering -> most popular files stored locally, all files stored in cloud
- distributed access
- Cloud backup
What is Azure Migrate?
- tool for migration onto cloud
- will examine your existing environment and make recommendations that will make move to cloud easier
- guided experience
- also helps discover servers and databases in environment
What is Azure Data box?
- suite of products
- it may be impractical to upload some quantities of data to the cloud
- will be mailed to you, you fill it with data and mail it back
- will show up in your account
- data will be encrypted in transit and wiped afterwards from box
What is part of the Azure Data box suite?
- Data Box - 100 TB
- Data box disk - 8 TB
- Data Box Heavy - 1 PB
What Data redundancy options exist?
- Geo-redundant storate (GRS)
- Geo-Zone redundant storage (GZRS)
- Zone redundant storage (ZRS)
- Locally redundant storage (LRS)
What is Locally redundant storage (LRS)?
- replicates data 3 times within a single data center in primary region
What is zone-redundant storage (ZRS)?
- replicates storage account synchronously across three Azure Availability Zones in primary region
- each AZ is physically seperate location with independent power, cooling and networking
What is Geo-redundant storage (GRS)?
- redundancy in secondary region
- using LRS redundancy is created
- copies data asynchronously to single physical location in secondary region, then using LRS copied three times
What is Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS)?
- copies data across three AZs in primary region using ZRS
- then using LRS in secondary region three additional times
What Data redundancy option is the cheapest?
- Locally-redundant storage (LRS)
