Storage Flashcards
What are the 3 main storage types?
Block (Azure Disks) - A hard disk attached to a VM. One disk can attach to one machine but one machine can attach to multiple disks
File (Azure Files) - Can attach or be shared to multiple machines
Object (Azure Blobs) - You want to upload and download objects without mounting them to your VM
What are two additional services within Azure Storage/
Azure Queues - Decouple applications using messages
Azure Tables - a NoSQL store (very basic functionality, recommended to ise Azure Cosmos DB)
How do you achieve data durability?
Replicate the data across multiple locations.
What is local redundant storage?
There will be three synchronous copies in the same data center - least expensive
What is zone redundant storage?
Three synchonrous in three AZs in the primary region
What is geo-redundant storage
LRS + Asynchronous copies to secondary region (three more copies using LRS)
what is Geo-zone-redundant storage
ZRS + Asynchronous copy to secondary region (three more copies using LRS)
What are region pairs?
Data copies across regions. Each primary region will have a secondary region paired with it E.g. East US and West US. They have a very fast data connection - they won’t be more than 300 km from one another.
What are the four disk storage types and corresponding use cases?
Standard HDD - For back, non-critical data or infrequent access
Standard SSD - Recommended for Web servers, lightly used enterprise apps and dev/test environments
Premium SSD - Recommended for production and performance sensitive workloads
Ultra disks - Recommended for input/output intensive workloads E.g. SAP HANA, top tiier databases like SQL.
What are managed and unmanaged disks?
Managed disks are where Azure handles the storage and availability (i.e. managed by them). Unmanaged is where you need to manage storage and the storage account.
What are good use cases for using Azure Files?
Media workflows - multiple people needing to access and edit video and audio files.
Enterprise file sharing.
Typically used to access to files from multiple VMs.
What is Azure File Sync?
This service/storage option shares and stores data in Azure files and retains the flexibility and compatibility of Windows server files - and On-premise solution for customers.
What is blob storage and what are the 3 types?
You can store large volumes of unstructured data - all file types.
Block blobs - Store text or binary files e.g. video or archives
Append blobs - Store log files (e.g. with more actions, the data will need to be updated)
Page blobs - Good to use as a boot disk, foundation for Azure Iaas disks.
What is Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2?
If your data is stored in blob storage then you can perform big data analytics on them using this service
What are the 3 access tiers?
Hot: Store frequently accessed data
Cool: Store infrequently accessed data for a min of 30 days
Archive: Rarely access data stored for min. 180 days. (Lowest storage cost but highest access cost). The access latency is hours and you need to “rehydrate” data coming out of Archive storage.
