Azure Blob Storage: Features, Benefits, And Usage

Azure Blob Storage Overview  

These days Data is viewed as the most curial aspect of doing business because it is used to draw insights, take business decisions & plan future business strategy by understanding targeted audience behavior. In this entire process mostly in organizations data is coming from different sources it could be expensive to store and a challenge to manage as most of the data is unstructured, to tackle this situation organizations can consider opting for a blob storage account as it provides comprehensive support for unstructured data workload on a single modern platform.  

By using blob storage, a company can store massive amounts of data inexpensively and make the most of what you have as it is scalable, durable, secure and capable of handling workloads which means it can meet any capacity requirement.  

It allows us to protect and manage data with ease so the company can store binary.  

data and application data, videos, audio files and anything knowing that business and data is well secured blob storage is built from the ground up to support scale security and availability requirements needed by mobile web and cloud need of application developers and we do so by using most popular developer frameworks.  

Types of Blobs –

There are three types of blobs supported by Azure Blob Storage which can be chosen based on the requirements:  

Types of Blob Storage Access Tiers –

• Hot access: It is Designed for data that is accessed frequently and has reduced access costs, but higher storage costs as compared to Cool and Achieve tiers.

• Cool access: Designed to handle a little bit longer access times and be used for data that is not accessed frequently. Its storage costs are lower than those of the Hot tier, but its access costs are higher. 

• Archive Access: It has lowest storage costs and longest access latency are found in the archive access tier, which is intended for long-term data retention. 

Benefits of Blob Storage –

• Azure Storage is designed to be massively scalable to meet the data storage and performance needs of today’s applications. 

• It is highly reliable as it ensures data is safe and available in an unexpected outage.  

• It also has an option to replicate data across data centers by storing it into different geographical regions for additional protection. Data replicated in this way remains highly Secure. All data written to an Azure storage account is encrypted by the service. Azure Storage provides you with fine-grained control over who has access to your data. 

• To access data stored in Azure Storage from any location in the world HTTP or HTTPS can be used. Along with a well-developed REST API, It also offers client libraries for Azure Storage in several languages, including.NET, Java, Node.js, Python, Go, and others. 

• Azure PowerShell and Azure CLI scripting is also supported by Azure Storage.  

Components of Azure Blob Storage –

The following are the minimal technical needs to use Azure Blob Storage: 

• Azure Subscription: To use Azure Blob Storage, you must have an active Azure subscription. You can create a free Azure account if you don’t already have one. 
  
  
  

• Storage Account: To use Blob Storage, you need to first create an Azure Storage account. This account gives you access to Blob Storage services and acts as a container for your blobs. Using Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, or the Azure site, one can establish a storage account. 

• Container: It acts as a directory that helps establish and manage the blobs. The storage account can contain numerous containers, which can hold blobs of various ranges. Container names are always specified in lowercase.  

• Blob: Blobs are objects in the form of unstructured data, including images, audio, video, and files. The different solutions for migrating the data into the Azure Blob Storage include Azure Data Factory, Azure Service, Azure Data Box, etc. 

Azure Blob Storage Integration options with other systems –

A few instances of how Azure Blob Storage can be connected to other Azure ecosystem services and systems. You can utilize Azure Blob Storage as a scalable and adaptable storage solution and investigate other integration options based on your unique requirements and use cases. 

• Azure Functions: This serverless compute solution lets you run event-triggered code without having to worry about maintaining infrastructure. Azure Functions can be integrated with Azure Blob Storage to enable the execution of functions in reaction to events related to blob storage, such the creation, deletion, or modification of blobs. You can create workflows and applications that are event-driven with this integration. 

• Azure Data Factory: Azure Data Factory can be used to transport and transform data between Blob Storage and other data sources like SQL Server or Hadoop 

• Azure Logic Apps: Workflows and business processes can be automated with Azure Logic Apps, a cloud-based integration solution. Azure Logic Apps’ connectors for Azure Blob Storage let you build workflows that work with blob storage, including file copies, data processing, and alerts sent in response to blob events. 

• Azure Databricks: Designed specifically for Azure, Azure Databricks is an analytics platform built on Apache Spark. Azure Blob Storage and Azure Databricks can be integrated to store input, intermediate, and output data produced by data processing operations. Scalable analytics and data processing are made possible by this combination. 

• Azure HDInsight: A fully managed cloud solution offering big data technologies like Spark and Apache Hadoop is called Azure HDInsight. Azure HDInsight clusters can use Azure Blob Storage as their primary data store. Using Hadoop, Spark, Hive, and other big data tools, you can process enormous datasets thanks to this integration. 

• Azure Synapse Analytics: It is formerly known as Azure SQL Data Warehouse, is a cloud-based analytics solution that lets you perform T-SQL queries to analyze massive amounts of data. Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Blob Storage can be integrated to store unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data. With this integration, you can run reports and analytics on a variety of datasets. 

• Azure Machine Learning: It allows Building, training, and deploying machine learning models with Azure Machine Learning, a cloud-based solution. To store datasets, model artifacts, and other resources needed for machine learning research, you can utilize Azure Blob Storage. Workflows involving machine learning are made easier to maintain and access with the integration of Azure Blob Storage. 

• Azure Stream Analytics: This real-time analytics tool enables you to handle and examine streaming data from several sources. For Azure Stream Analytics jobs, Azure Blob Storage can be used as an input and an output source. You can ingest, analyze, and save streaming data in blobs thanks to this integration. 

Conclusion –

Azure Blob Storage is a powerful and flexible cloud storage option that offers several benefits. With many storage layers, it provides an enduring and scalable storage solution to satisfy the demands of diverse applications in terms of both cost and performance. In addition, Azure Blob Storage features integration with other Azure services, built-in security safeguards, and accessibility through various tools and APIs. Azure Blob Storage is a solid and affordable solution for companies looking to store and manage unstructured data in the cloud. 

In the next blog, we will explore Azure Blob Storage in detail, which covers: 

How to create Azure Blob Storage Components such as storage account, container, and blob.