Azure storage accounts

Question 1

What is a storage account?

Answer 1

a unique namespace for your Azure Storage data that’s accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS

Question 2

What are the benefits of holding data in a storage account?

Answer 2

Data in this account is secure, highly available, durable, and massively scalable.

Question 3

When you create your storage account, you’ll start by picking the storage account type. The type of account determines the storage services and redundancy options and has an impact on the use cases.

List out the redundancy options

Answer 3

• Locally redundant storage (LRS)
• Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
• Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
• Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
• Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS)
• Read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA-GZRS)

Question 4

List the different types of storage accounts

Answer 4

• Standard general-purpose v2
• Premium block blobs
• Premium file shares
• Premium page blobs

Question 5

What are the supported services, redundancy options and use cases for:
Standard storage account type

Answer 5

Services:
Blob Storage (including Data Lake Storage), Queue Storage, Table Storage, and Azure Files

Redundancy options:
LRS, GRS, RA-GRS, ZRS, GZRS, RA-GZRS

Use cases:
It is recommended for most scenarios using Azure Storage. Use the premium file shares account type if you want support for the network file system (NFS) in Azure Files.

Question 6

What are the supported services, redundancy options and use cases for:
Premium block blobs storage account type

Answer 6

Services:
Blob Storage (including Data Lake Storage)

Redundancy options:
LRS, ZRS

Use cases:
for block blobs and append blobs. Recommended for scenarios with high transaction rates, smaller objects, or requiring consistently low storage latency.

Question 7

What are the supported services, redundancy options and use cases for:
Premium file shares storage account type

Answer 7

Services:
Azure Files

Redundancy options:
LRS, ZRS

Use cases:
Recommended for enterprise or high-performance scale applications. Use this account type if you want a storage account that supports both Server Message Block (SMB) and NFS file shares.

Question 8

What are the supported services, redundancy options and use cases for:
Premium page blobs storage account type

Answer 8

Services:
Page Blobs only

Redundancy options:
LRS

Use cases:
Page Blobs

Question 9

What forms the storage endpoints for your storage accounts?

Answer 9

The combination of the account name and the Azure Storage service endpoint forms the endpoints for your storage account.

One of the benefits of using an Azure Storage Account is having a unique namespace in Azure for your data. To do this, every storage account in Azure must have a unique-in-Azure account name.

Question 10

When naming your storage account, keep these rules in mind:

Answer 10

• Storage account names must be between 3 and 24 characters in length and may contain numbers and lowercase letters only.
• Your storage account name must be unique within Azure.

Question 11

The endpoint format for Azure storage accounts is shown below:

https://<storage-account-name>.\_\_\_\_.core.windows.net</storage-account-name>

Fill in the blanks for each storage service after the storage account name

Answer 11

Blob Storage
https://<storage-account-name>.blob.core.windows.net</storage-account-name>

Data Lake Storage Gen2
https://<storage-account-name>.dfs.core.windows.net</storage-account-name>

Azure Files
https://<storage-account-name>.file.core.windows.net</storage-account-name>

Queue Storage
https://<storage-account-name>.queue.core.windows.net</storage-account-name>

Table Storage
https://<storage-account-name>.table.core.windows.net</storage-account-name>

Question 12

What is the purpose of storage redundancy?

Answer 12

Redundancy ensures that your storage account meets its availability and durability targets even in the face of failures.

Azure Storage always stores multiple copies of your data so that it’s protected from planned and unplanned events such as transient hardware failures, network or power outages, and natural disasters.

Question 13

When deciding which redundancy option is best for your scenario, consider the tradeoffs between lower costs and higher availability. The factors that help determine which redundancy option you should choose include:

Answer 13

• How your data is replicated in the primary region.
• Whether your data is replicated to a second region that is geographically distant to the primary region, to protect against regional disasters.
• Whether your application requires read access to the replicated data in the secondary region if the primary region becomes unavailable.

Question 14

Describe Redundancy in the primary region

Answer 14

Data in an Azure Storage account is always replicated three times in the primary region. Azure Storage offers two options for how your data is replicated in the primary region, locally redundant storage (LRS) and zone-redundant storage (ZRS).

Question 15

Describe Locally redundant storage

Answer 15

Locally redundant storage (LRS) replicates your data three times within a single data centre in the primary region. LRS provides at least 11 nines of durability (99.999999999%) of objects over a given year.

Question 16

What are the use cases and downsides of LRS?

Answer 16

LRS protects your data against server rack and drive failures. However, if a disaster such as fire or flooding occurs within the data centre, all replicas of a storage account using LRS may be lost or unrecoverable. To mitigate this risk, Microsoft recommends using zone-redundant storage (ZRS), geo-redundant storage (GRS), or geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS).

LRS is the lowest-cost redundancy option and offers the least durability compared to other options.

Question 17

Describe Zone redundant storage

Answer 17

For Availability Zone-enabled Regions, zone-redundant storage (ZRS) replicates your Azure Storage data synchronously across three Azure availability zones in the primary region. ZRS offers durability for Azure Storage data objects of at least 12 nines (99.9999999999%) over a given year.

Question 18

when should you use ZRS and why?

Answer 18

Microsoft recommends using ZRS in the primary region for scenarios that require high availability. ZRS is also recommended for restricting replication of data within a country or region to meet data governance requirements.

With ZRS, your data is still accessible for both read and write operations even if a zone becomes unavailable. No remounting of Azure file shares from the connected clients is required. If a zone becomes unavailable, Azure undertakes networking updates, such as DNS repointing. These updates may affect your application if you access data before the updates have completed.

Question 19

Describe Redundancy in a secondary region

Answer 19

For applications requiring high durability, you can choose to additionally copy the data in your storage account to a secondary region that is hundreds of miles away from the primary region. If the data in your storage account is copied to a secondary region, then your data is durable even in the event of a catastrophic failure that prevents the data in the primary region from being recovered.

By default, data in the secondary region isn’t available for read or write access unless there’s a failover to the secondary region. If the primary region becomes unavailable, you can choose to fail over to the secondary region. After the failover has completed, the secondary region becomes the primary region, and you can again read and write data.

Question 20

Do you have much choice on your secondary region?

Answer 20

When you create a storage account, you select the primary region for the account. The paired secondary region is based on Azure Region Pairs, and can’t be changed.

Question 21

Azure Storage offers two options for copying your data to a secondary region. these are:

Answer 21

geo-redundant storage (GRS) and geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS). GRS is similar to running LRS in two regions, and GZRS is similar to running ZRS in the primary region and LRS in the secondary region.

Question 22

Describe Geo-redundant storage

Answer 22

GRS copies your data synchronously three times within a single physical location in the primary region using LRS. It then copies your data asynchronously to a single physical location in the secondary region (the region pair) using LRS. GRS offers durability for Azure Storage data objects of at least 16 nines (99.99999999999999%) over a given year.

Question 23

Describe Geo-zone-redundant storage

Answer 23

GZRS combines the high availability provided by redundancy across availability zones with protection from regional outages provided by geo-replication. Data in a GZRS storage account is copied across three Azure availability zones in the primary region (similar to ZRS) and is also replicated to a secondary geographic region, using LRS, for protection from regional disasters. Microsoft recommends using GZRS for applications requiring maximum consistency, durability, and availability, excellent performance, and resilience for disaster recovery.

GZRS is designed to provide at least 16 nines (99.99999999999999%) of durability of objects over a given year.

Question 24

Describe Read access to data in the secondary region

Answer 24

Geo-redundant storage (with GRS or GZRS) replicates your data to another physical location in the secondary region to protect against regional outages. However, that data is available to be read only if the customer or Microsoft initiates a failover from the primary to secondary region. However, if you enable read access to the secondary region, your data is always available, even when the primary region is running optimally. For read access to the secondary region, enable read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) or read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA-GZRS).

Question 25

Can data ever be lost if there is a failover to the secondary region?

Answer 25

Because data is replicated to the secondary region asynchronously, a failure that affects the primary region may result in data loss if the primary region can’t be recovered. The interval between the most recent writes to the primary region and the last write to the secondary region is known as the recovery point objective (RPO). The RPO indicates the point in time to which data can be recovered. Azure Storage typically has an RPO of less than 15 minutes, although there’s currently no SLA on how long it takes to replicate data to the secondary region.

Question 26

The Azure Storage platform includes the following data services:

Answer 26

-Azure Blobs: A massively scalable object store for text and binary data. Also includes support for big data analytics through Data Lake Storage Gen2.
-Azure Files: Managed file shares for cloud or on-premises deployments.
-Azure Queues: A messaging store for reliable messaging between application components.
-Azure Disks: Block-level storage volumes for Azure VMs.
-Azure Tables: NoSQL table option for structured, non-relational data.

Question 27

Benefits of Azure Storage

Answer 27

-Durable and highly available: Redundancy ensures that your data is safe if transient hardware failures occur. You can also opt to replicate data across data centers or geographical regions. Data replicated in this way remains highly available if an unexpected outage occurs.

-Secure. All data written to an Azure storage account is encrypted by the service. Azure Storage provides you with fine-grained control over who has access to your data.

-Scalable. Azure Storage is designed to be massively scalable to meet the data storage and performance needs of today’s applications.

-Managed. Azure handles hardware maintenance, updates, and critical issues for you.

-Accessible. Data in Azure Storage is accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. Microsoft provides client libraries for Azure Storage in a variety of languages, including .NET, Java, Node.js, Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, and others, as well as a mature REST API. Azure Storage supports scripting in Azure PowerShell or Azure CLI. And the Azure portal and Azure Storage Explorer offer easy visual solutions for working with your data.

Question 28

What are Azure blobs?

Answer 28

Azure Blob storage is an object storage solution for the cloud. It can store massive amounts of data, such as text or binary data. Azure Blob storage is unstructured, meaning that there are no restrictions on the kinds of data it can hold. Blob storage can manage thousands of simultaneous uploads, massive amounts of video data, constantly growing log files, and can be reached from anywhere with an internet connection.

Blobs aren’t limited to common file formats. A blob could contain gigabytes of binary data streamed from a scientific instrument, an encrypted message for another application, or data in a custom format for an app you’re developing. One advantage of blob storage over disk storage is that it doesn’t require developers to think about or manage disks. Data is uploaded as blobs, and Azure takes care of the physical storage needs.

Question 29

Blob storage is ideal for?

Answer 29

Serving images or documents directly to a browser.
Storing files for distributed access.
Streaming video and audio.
Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.
Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service.

Question 30

How do we access blob storage?

Answer 30

Objects in blob storage can be accessed from anywhere in the world via HTTP or HTTPS. Users or client applications can access blobs via URLs, the Azure Storage REST API, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, or an Azure Storage client library. The storage client libraries are available for multiple languages, including .NET, Java, Node.js, Python, PHP, and Ruby.