Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Tabular summary of the article Azure Blob Storage: Hot, cool, and archive (preview) storage tiers To manage costs for your expanding storage needs, it's helpful to organize your data based on attributes like frequency-of-access and planned retention period. With hot, cool, and archive storage tiers, Azure Blob storage addresses this need for differentiated storage tiers with separate pricing models. Blob Storage Accounts are specialized storage accounts for storing your unstructured data as blobs (objects) in Azure Storage distinct from General Purpose Storage Account. You cannot convert an existing storage account to a Blob storage account Blob storage accounts cannot be used to store virtual machine disks or page blobs. Going forward, Blob storage accounts are the recommended way for storing blobs Hot storage tier Cool storage tier Archive storage tier Purpose for storing data that is accessed frequently for storing data that is infrequently accessed a...

Tabular summary paraphrased from the article  Deciding when to use Azure Blobs, Azure Files, or Azure Disks Attribute Azure Blobs Azure Files Azure Disk Description Provides an SMB interface, client libraries, and a REST interface that allows access from anywhere to stored files. Provides client libraries and a REST interface that allows unstructured data to be stored and accessed at a massive scale in block blobs. Provides client libraries and a REST interface that allows data to be persistently stored and accessed from an attached virtual hard disk. When to use You want to "lift and shift" an application to the cloud which already uses the native file system APIs to share data between it and other applications running in Azure. You want to store development and debugging tools that need to be accessed from many virtual machines. You want your application to support streaming and random access scenarios.  You want to be able to access application data ...

Azure offers Storage replication options : " Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) Account" is a storage account for which data is replicated synchronously only within a Primary Region. " Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) Account" is a storage account for which data is replicated across multiple facilities. These facilities may be within the same geographical region or across two geographical regions. " Geographically Redundant Storage (GRS) Account" is a storage account for which data is replicated synchronously within a Primary Region and then replicated asynchronously to a Secondary Region. You cannot directly read data from or write data to the Secondary Region associated with GRS Accounts. " Read Access Geographically Redundant Storage (RA-GRS) Account" is a storage account for which data is replicated synchronously within a Primary Region and then replicated asynchronously to a Secondary Region. You can directly read data from, but cannot w...