Describe capabilities of Azure storage

Question 1

Azure Blob Storage

Answer 1

Azure Blob Storage is a service that enables you to store massive amounts of unstructured data as binary large objects, or blobs, in the cloud. Blobs are an efficient way to store data files in a format that is optimized for cloud-based storage, and applications can read and write them by using the Azure blob storage API.

Supports 3 types of blobs:

1. Block blobs
   -Store text and binary data
   -Made up of blocks of data that can be managed individually
   -Store up to about 4.75 TiB of data
2. Append blobs
   -Optimized for append operations
   -Ideal for scenarios such as logging from virtual machine
3. Page blobs
   -Store random access files up to 8 TB in size
   -Store virtual hard drive (VHD) files and serve as disks for Azure Virtual Machine

Blob storage provides three access tiers, which help to balance access latency and storage cost:
-The Hot tier is the default. You use this tier for blobs that are accessed frequently. The blob data is stored on high-performance media.
-The Cool tier has lower performance and incurs reduced storage charges compared to the Hot tier. Use the Cool tier for data that is accessed infrequently.
-The Archive tier provides the lowest storage cost, but with increased latency. The Archive tier is intended for historical data that mustn’t be lost, but is required only rarely.

Question 2

Azure DataLake Storage Gen2

Answer 2

Azure Data Lake Store (Gen1) is a separate service for hierarchical data storage for analytical data lakes, often used by so-called big data analytical solutions that work with structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data stored in files.

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is a newer version of this service that is integrated into Azure Storage; enabling you to take advantage of the scalability of blob storage and the cost-control of storage tiers, combined with the hierarchical file system capabilities and compatibility with major analytics systems of Azure Data Lake Store.

-Systems like Hadoop in Azure HDInsight, Azure Databricks, and Azure Synapse Analytics can mount a distributed file system hosted in Azure Data Lake Store Gen2 and use it to process huge volumes of data.

-To create an Azure Data Lake Store Gen2 files system, you must enable the Hierarchical Namespace option of an Azure Storage account.
-After upgrading a storage account to support a hierarchical namespace for blob storage, you can’t revert it to a flat namespace.

Question 3

Azure File Storage

Answer 3

Azure Files is a fully managed file share in the cloud. A file share is a centralized server for storage that allows multiple connections. By hosting file shares in Azure, organizations can eliminate hardware costs and maintenance overhead, and benefit from high availability and scalable cloud storage for files.

-You create Azure File storage in a storage account. Azure Files enables you to share up to 100 TB of data in a single storage account.
-The maximum size of a single file is 1 TB, but you can set quotas to limit the size of each share below this figure.
-Currently, Azure File Storage supports up to 2000 concurrent connections per shared file.

Azure File Storage offers two performance tiers. The Standard tier uses hard disk-based hardware in a datacenter, and the Premium tier uses solid-state disks. The Premium tier offers greater throughput, but is charged at a higher rate.

Azure Files supports two common network file sharing protocols:

-Server Message Block (SMB) file sharing is commonly used across multiple operating systems (Windows, Linux, macOS).
-Network File System (NFS) shares are used by some Linux and macOS versions. To create an NFS share, you must use a premium tier storage account and create and configure a virtual network through which access to the share can be controlled.

Question 4

Azure Files - Use Cases

Answer 4

-Completely replace or supplement on-premises file servers
-Lift-and-shift your on-premise storage to the cloud via Classic Lift (where both app and data are moved to azure) and Hybrid lift (where the app data is moved to azure files, and the app continues to run on-premises)
-Multiple VMs and developers workstations need to access the same config files
-You can use Azure Files to persist volumes for stateful containers

Why use Azure Files instead of setting up your own File Share Server?
-Shared Access
-Fully Managed
-Automate management and creation of file shared with Azure API and PowerShell
-Resiliency - build to be dirable and always working

Question 5

Azure Tables

Answer 5

Azure Table Storage is a NoSQL storage solution that makes use of tables containing key/value data items. Each item is represented by a row that contains columns for the data fields that need to be stored.

-An Azure Table enables you to store semi-structured data.

-To help ensure fast access, Azure Table Storage splits a table into partitions. Partitioning is a mechanism for grouping related rows, based on a common property or partition key.

The key in an Azure Table Storage table comprises two elements; the partition key that identifies the partition containing the row, and a row key that is unique to each row in the same partition.

There are two ways to interact with Tables:
1. Azure Tables Storage API
2. Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer