What is Azure Blob Storage?

1. Pre-requisite Knowledge –

Before we start with the understanding of Blob Storage, we should know –

• Basic knowledge of cloud computing
• Basic knowledge of Microsoft Azure

2. Background –

        I would like to explain what is Azure storage before we jump to the topic of Azure Blob storage.

    Azure Storage –

• In simple words, it is Microsoft’s cloud storage. It has a wide variety of different types of cloud storage depending upon the data object to store. We can store text, binary data, files/documents, messaging contents, NoSQL, etc.
• Benefits - Azure cloud storage is highly available, secure, tremendous scalable, accessible over HTTP/HTTPS, etc.
• Azure Blobs, Azure Files, Azure Queues and Azure tables are the different services coming under the Azure storage services.

3. Introduction –

• As I explained above, Azure Blob storage is one type of service that comes under Azure storage.
• Microsoft Azure Blob storage is used to store the unstructured data like text or binary information.

     Unstructured data – data which doesn’t hold any data models or definition.

• Data stored in the Blob storage can be accessed via its URL over HTTP or HTTPS.
• We can fetch the objects from Blob storage using Azure storage REST API, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell and by using Azure storage client library which is available in different languages like .NET, Java, Node.JS, Python, PHP, and Ruby.
• Resources –
  • We need to have one storage account
  • A container in the account
  • A blob in the container
  • The below picture captured from Microsoft which explains the relationship between these three resources.

4. Types of Azure Blob storage –
   
   - Block blobs – It stores the data objects like text and binary up to 4.7 TB. The objects are stored in blocks. We can manage individual blocks.
   
   - Append blobs – This type of storage is like block blobs but optimized for append activities. This is ideal to use when we need to append the information/data to the existing data like logging.
   
   - Page blobs – It is like virtual hard drive files. It will serve as disks in virtual machines. It stored the random-access files up to 8 TB.

5. Recommendation - when to use Azure Blob?
   
   - To store the text and binary data
   - Streaming video and audio information
   - To store the data of backups, disaster recovery
   - To store the data of archiving
   - Access the images over the browser

Conclusion - In this article, we have learned what is Azure Blob storage, what is the purpose of Azure blob storage and when it is recommended to use.