Azure-storage-services
Contents covered
Compare Azure storage services
Azure Storage tiers
Azure Storage redundancy options
Storage account options and storage types
Identity options for moving files, including AzCopu, Azure Storage Explorer and Azure File Sync
Migration options, including Azure Migrate and Azure Data Box
Azure Storage Accounts
Storage account provides a unique namespace for your azure storage data thats accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. Data in this account is secure, highly available, durable and massievly scalable.
When you create your storage account, you will start by picking the storage acccount type. The type of account determines the storage services and redundancy options and has an impact on the use cases.
Locally Redundant Storage (LRS)
Geo-Redundant Storage (GRS)
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
Geo-Sone-redundant storage (GZRS)
Read-access geo-sone-redundant access (RA-GZRS)
Storage account endpoints
One of the benefits of using a Azure storage account is having a unique namespace in Azure for your data. In order to do this, every storaeg account in azure must have a unique-in-azure account name. The combination of the account named in the Azure storage service endpoint forms the endpoints for your storage account
Azure Storage account naming rules
must be 3 to 24 characters length
can contain numbers, lowercase letters only
your storage account name must be unique within Azure.
This uniqueness supports the ability to have a unique, accessible namespace in Azure
The endpoint format for different azure storage services
Blob Storage -> https://.blob.core.windows.net
Data Lake Storage Gen2 -> https://.dfa.core.windows.net
Azure Files -> https://.file.core.windows.net
Queue Storage -> https://.queue.core.windows.net
Table Storage -> https://.table.core.windows.net
Azure Storage Redundancy
Azure storage always stores multiple copies of your data so that its protected from planned and unplanned events such as transient hardware failures, network or power outages and natual disasters. Redundancy ensures that you storage account meets its availability and durability targets even in the face of failures
Redundancy in the primary region
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 int he primary region, Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) and Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS)
Locally Redundant Storage
This replicates your data three times within a single data center in the primary region LRS provides at least of 11 nines of durability of objects over a given year.
Zone redundant Storage
For availability zone enabled regions, zone redundant storage replicates your azure storage data synchronously across three azure availability zones in the primary region. ARS offers durability for azure storage data objects of at least 12 nines over a given year
With ZRS, your data is still accessible for both read and write operations even if a zone becomes unavailable. No remounting of Azure files 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.
Redundancy in a secondary region
For applications requiring high durability, you can choose to additionally copy the data in your storage to a secondary region that is hundreds of miles away from the primary region.
When you create a storage account, you select the primary region for the account. The paried secondary region is based on Azure region pairs and cant be changed.
Azure Storage offers two options for copying your data to a secondary region:
Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
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
By default, the data in the secondary region isnt available for read and write access unless there is 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.
Data is replicated in secondary region asynchronously, hence a failure that affects the priimary region may result in data loss if the primary region cant 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. The recovery point objective indicates the point in time to which data can be recovered. Azure storage typically has RPO of less than 15 minutes.
Get redundant storage
GRS copies your data synchronoulsy 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 using LRS
Geo-Zone-redundant storage
GZRS combines the high availability provided by redundancy across availability zones with protection from region outages provided by geo-replication. Data in a GZRS storage account is copied across three Azure availability zones in the primary region which is similar to ZRS and is also replicated to a secondary geographic region, using LRS for protection from regional disasters.
Read access to data in the secondary region
Geo-redundant storage replicates your data to another physical location in the secondary region to protect aganist regional outages. However, that data is available to be read only if hte customer or Microsoft initiates a failover from the primary to secondary region. However, if you enable read access to the secondary region, you 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 or RA-GZRS
Azure Storage Services
The Azure Storage platform includes the following data services
Azure Blobs: A massively scalable object store for text and binary data. Also includes support for big data analytics through Data Lake Sroage Gen2
Azure Files: Managed file shares for cloud or on-premise deployments
Azure Queues: A messaging store for reliable messaging between application components
Azure Disks: Block-level storage volume for Azure VMs
Azure Tables: NoSQL table option for structured, non-relational data
Benefits include Durable and highly available, secure, scalable, managed, accessible
Azure Blobs
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 simultenous uploads, massive amounts of video data, constantly growing log files and can be reached from anywhere with an internet connection
Blobs arent limited to common file formats.
One advantage of blob storage over disk storage is that it doesnt require developers to think abou or manage disks. Data is uploaded as blobs and Azure takes care of the physical storage needs
Blob storage is ideal for
Serving images or documents directly to a browser
Storing files for distributed access
Streaming video and audio
Storing data for backup and restore
Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service
Acccessing blob storage
Users can access blobs via URLs, the Azure Storage REST API, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, or Azure Storage client library
Azure Files
Azure Fule storage offers fully manages file shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry standard Server Message Block(SMB) or Network File System(NFS) protocols. Azure Files file shares can be mounted concurrently by cloud or on-premise deployments.
SMB Azure files shares can be cached on Windows servers with Azure File Sync for fast access near where the data is being used.
Benefits include
Shared Access
Fully managed
Scripting and tooling
Resiliency
Familiar programmability
Azure Queues
Is a service for storing large number of messages. Once stored, you can access the messages from anywhere in the world via authenticated calls using HTTp or HTTPS. A queue can contians as many messages as your storage account has room for. Queues are commonly used to create a backlog of work to process asynchronously
Queue storage can be combined with compute functions like Azure Functions to take an action when a message is received.
Azure Disks
Conceptually they are same as physical disk, but they are virtualized offering greater resiliency and availability than a physical disk.
Azure Tables
stores large amounts of unstructured data.These are a NoSQL datastore that accepts authenticated calls from inside and outside the Azure cloud. This enables you to use Azure tables to build your hybrid or multi-cloud solution and have your data always available.
Identity Azure data migration options
Azure Migrate
Azure Migrate is a service that helps you migrate from an on-premise environment to the cloud. Azure Migrate functions as a hub to help you manage the assessment and migration of your on-premises datacenter to Azure.
It provides
Unified migration platform
a single portal to start, run, and track your migration to Azure
Range to tools
azure migrate tools include Azure Migrate:Discovery and assessment and Azure Migrate: Server Migration also integrates with other Azure services.
Assessment and migration
in the azure migrate hub you can assess and migrate you on-premise infrastructure to Azure.
Integrate Tools
The Azure Migrate hub includes the following tools to help with migration
Azure Migrate: Discovery and assessment
Discover and assess on-premise servers running on VMware, Hyper-V and physically servers in preperation for migration to Azure
azure Migrate: Server Migration
Migrate VMware VMs, Hyper-V VMs, physical servers and other virtualized servers and public cloud VMs to Azure
Data Migration Assistant
is a standalone tool to assess SQL servers. It helps pinpoint potential problem blocking migration.
It identifies unsupported features, new features that can benefit you after migration and the right path for database migration
Azure Database Migration Service
Migrate on-premise databases to Azure VMs running SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, or SQL Managed Instances
Azure App Service migration assistane
is a standalone tool to assess on-premise websites for migration to Azure App Service.
Azure Data box
use this tool to move large amounts to offline data to Azure
Azure Data box
Azure data box is a physical migration service that helps transfer large amounts of offline data in a quick, inexpensive and reliable way.\
Once the data from your import order is uploaded to Azure, the disks on the device are wiped clean in accordance with NIST 800-88r1 standards. For an export order, the disks are earsed once the device reaches the Azure datacenter
Identify Azure file movement options
In addition to large scale migration using services like Azure Migrate, Azure also tools designed to help you move or interact with individual files or small file groups.
AzCopy
AzCopy is a command0line utility that you can use to copy blobs or files to or from your storage account. With AzCopy, you can upload, download, copy file in between storage accounts and even synchronize files. AzCopy can even be configured to work with other cloud providers to help move files back and forth between clouds.
Synchronizing blobs or files with AzCopy is one-direction synchronization. When you synchronize, you designated the source and destination and AzCopy will copy files or blobs in that direction. It doesnt synchronize bi-directionally based on timestamps or other metadata.
Azure Storage Explorer
It is a standalone application that provides GUI to manage files and blobs in you Azure Storage Account. BTS it uses AzCopy to perform actions
Azure File Sync
Azure file sync is a tool that lets you centralize your file shares in Azure Files and keep the flexibility, performance and compatability of a Windows file server. Once you install Azure File sync on your local windows server, it will automatically stay bi-directionally synced with your files in Azure.
With Azure File Sync you can
Use any protocol thats available on windows server to access your data locally, including SMB, NFS, FTPS
Have as many caches as you need across the world
Replace a failed local server by installing Azure File Sync on a new server in the same datacenter
Configure cloud tiering so that most frequently accessed files are replicated locally, while infrequently access files are key in the cloud until requested.
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