Microsoft Azure Cloud offers several types of scalable, high-availability storage: for tables, queues, files, blobs, and Azure virtual machine disks
Type | Description |
---|---|
Locally redundant storage (LRS) | Keeps multiple copies of your data in one data center. |
Zone redundant storage (ZRS) | Keeps multiple copies of your data in different data centers in different regions. |
Geo-redundant storage (GRS) | Holds multiple copies of your data in one region and replicates the data to the second region, asynchronously. |
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) | Allows read access from the second region, which is used for GRS, and the read availability is 99.99% |
Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS) | Copies your data synchronously across three Azure availability zones in the primary region using ZRS |
Read Access Geo-zone-redundant storage(RA-GZRS) | Exposes a read endpoint on this secondary replica allowing you to read data in the event of primary region unavailability |
‘Blob’ stands for Binary Large Object and includes text files, images, audios, and videos. Azure Blob is a service that stores massive unstructured data that can be accessed from any place via protocols like HTTP or HTTPS.
This is the most basic and the cheapest way to store your files in Azure.
There are three types of blobs
Queue Storage is a type of storage designed to connect components of your application. It allows you to build flexible applications with decoupled and independent components that rely on asynchronous message queuing.
Table storage can store, you guessed it, tables. Microsoft Azure Table Storage was designed to store structured NoSQL data. The storage is hugely scalable and, at the same time, cheap to keep data in.
It is schemaless, i.e., the data does not have a fixed structure. You can easily store datasets that do not require any joins or foreign keys. You can denormalize them to make quicker access. You can scale up the tables based on your requirements.
Microsoft Azure Disk Storage works on the basis of Page Blobs. It is a service that allows you to create disks for your virtual machines. The disk, created in Disk Storage, can be accessed from only one virtual machine. In other words - it is your local drive.
They are accessible via SMB.