Azure Storage

1. What is Azure Storage Account

Azure Storage Account is a managed service in Azure. The Storage Account can be used by anyone who needs to have a massively scalable solution for storing any kind of data. Azure Storage is highly available, reliable and durable.

 

2. What are the various services of Storage Accounts?

Azure supports the following four types of Services.

Service	Description
Container Service (formerly known as Blob Service)	Container Service stores any type of file ex: .PDFs, Videos, Documents and even Softwares
Queue Service	Queues stores simple messages in Text formats. These messages can be stored and retrieved by any application.
File Share Service	Azure File Share can be used as a File Share to share files with anyone over internet securely
Table Service	Table Service is a semi no-sql store for storing massive number of documents

3. What are different types of Storage Accounts?

Below are the four types of Storage Accounts available

Type	Description
Standard general-purpose v2	Standard storage account type for blobs, file shares, queues, and tables.
Premium block blobs	Premium storage account type for block blobs and append blobs. Recommended for scenarios with high transactions rates.
Premium file shares	Premium storage account type for file shares only. Recommended for enterprise or high-performance scale applications.
Premium page blobs	Premium storage account type for page blobs only.

 

4. What is the total capacity of Storage Account?

5 Peta Bytes

 

5. How many Storage Accounts can be created in one Subscription?

250 Storage Accounts can be created per Subscription per region.

 

6. What are Access Keys. What is the significance of Access keys?

Access Keys are used to authenticate the applications when making requests to this Azure storage account. These are like master keys for accessing the entire Storage Account. Let’s say, you have 100 Blobs, 200 Queues and Plenty of File Shares, then, you can access all of these services using any one of these valid Access Keys. More info

 

7. What is Shared Access Signature?

Shared Access Signature is used to provide authentication on various Storage Services and Objects. SAS provide a very granular level access. SAS provide the below.

·       What Azure services the client can access

·       How long the SAS should be valid

·       From which IP Address the client can access the Storage Services

·       What permissions (Read / Write/ Delete / List) does the client can have.

8. What are different types of Share Access Signatures?

8.1. User delegation SAS

A user delegation SAS is secured with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) credentials and also by the permissions specified for the SAS. A user delegation SAS applies to Blob storage only.

8.2. Service SAS

A service SAS is secured with the storage account key. A service SAS delegates access to a resource in only one of the Azure Storage services: Blob storage, Queue storage, Table storage, or Azure Files.

8.3. Account SAS

An account SAS is secured with the storage account key. An account SAS delegates access to resources in one or more of the storage services.

 

9. What are various Redundancy options available in Azure Storage Account?

Azure storage redundant options helps customers in storing their files in Azure reliably. Below are the Redundancy options available in Azure Storage.

Type	Description
LRS (Local Redundant Storage)	With LRS, Azure Stores 3 copies of the files in 3 different servers within a Single Data Center. If there is a failure in one server, the data can be copied from the second server automatically. LRS helps in recovering from hard failures of a single server.
ZRS (Zone Redundant Storage)	With ZRS, Azure stores 3 copies of the files across two or more Data Centers within the same region. ZRS helps us in getting recovered from the Data Center failures with-in a Single region.
GRS (Geo Redundant Storage)	With GRS, Azure stores 6 copies of the files. 3 in Primary Region and 3 in Secondary region. GRS helps us in getting recovered from the Region failures. In GRS, You can only read and write from primary region. However, you cannot Read or write from secondary region.
RA-GRS (Geo Redundant Storage)	With RA-GRS, Azure stores 6 copies of the files. 3 in Primary Region and 3 in Secondary region. RA-GRS helps us in getting recovered from the Region failures. The only difference between GRS and RA-GRS is that, it is possible to read the files from secondary region in RA-GRS which is not possible in GRS.