AZ-900 Episode 11 | Azure Storage Services | Blob, Queue, Table, Files, Disk and Storage Tiers

hello everyone it's adam welcome back to microsoft azure fundamentals course as we move along the core services we need to learn what are the options in azure to store our unstructured and semi-structured data so let's dive right in [Music] so let's talk about storage services in azure today we will learn about azure blob storage and its storage tiers we will also talk about four other services called file storage table storage queue storage and disk storage but before we move to those services let's talk about general classification of data our first type is structured data for

structured data the idea is very simple that means your data is laid out so nicely that you can describe it using specific schema so for each table each row of the table you can define what are the properties of each row what are the type of those properties and each row that you insert into that table has to follow the schema additionally if you have multiple tables you can define relationship between those tables this is the scenario that you typically see in relational databases we will learn about those a little bit more in the next

episode additionally the second type of data is so-called semi-structure in this case you still have a table but each row within this table do not need to follow any specific schema that means each row can have its own unique properties the only common property is usually some sort of key like an id column so you can say this is a less formalized way of storing your data and lastly we have unstructured data so data like images movies applications of binary application files txt files and many more files files that do not follow structure that can

represent pretty much any kind of data which brings me to our first service azure blob storage we were talking about this unstructured data and any kind of unstructured data can be called blob blob stands for binary large object so any kind of file and you can put those blobs into azure blob storage into something called container container is just a bucket for multiple blobs you can have more than one container with an azure blob storage and it is designed to allow both applications and users to work with unstructured files in the cloud so azure blob

storage is simply a service designed to store any kind of file in azure remember the blob is just a synonym for file because binary large object can represent anything really additionally there are free storage tiers storage tiers allow microsoft to provide you better performance and better pricing depending on how often do you access your data that's why there are kindly free storage tiers and the first tier is so called hot you use this for your frequently accessed data so if you're building web application and this web application is serving images to your customers then this

would be the storage tier that you would use because hot storage tier provides the best performance for your files but if your solution also store files that are accessed less frequently then you can use cool tier with cool tier you are accepting lower availability and lower performance for accessing your files while maintaining high durability and getting significant discount for storing that data this is the perfect solution for storing older versions and backups for your applications but if you have files that you never plan to access like a very very long term backups let's say backup

that you need to keep for 10 years and you can use archive storage tier in this case the availability is the lowest because retrieving that data might even take couple of hours but the price is also the lowest you're getting 10 times the discount for storing data in archived tier this really is the lowest price per gigabyte that you can get when storing data in azure and that's pretty much it when it comes to blob storage the second service that we'll learn about today is azure queue storage for q storage it's a very small service

but very significant when building applications when you have application that has several tasks to be completed and each of those three tasks might take some time to complete what you can do is output those into azure queue as separate messages this will allow background processes and other services to pick those messages from the queue at their own pace and let them process those asynchronously this will not only offload your front-end application but also allow you to pick more suited services for the background processing the azure queue storage is a service that allows you to store

small pieces of data so called messages so that you can build scalable asynchronous processing solutions in azure and that's pretty much it when it comes to queue storage a very simple service with very specific use case in mind and it fits perfectly in this kind of scenarios so the next service on our list is azure table storage this service was designed with semi-structured data in mind so that both users and application can output the semi-structured data form into tables and this table is part of table storage of course you can have more than one table

because table storage is just like a database where you store multiple tables with your data just remember this is a semi-structured database so there are no drawings no schemas just your data and a simple storage this kind of databases are also called nosql databases to summarize azure table storage is one of the storage services in azure for your semi-structured data needs you can work insert update and operate on the data in a semi-structured form so remember you use this kind of database when you don't need stuff like foreign joins foreign keys relationships or when you

don't need to follow any strict schema additionally this service is designed for fast access so if you would store petabytes of data you would still get your data within milliseconds if you would use compound key to access that specific rows so it is quite scalable even though it's a simple service and similarly to blob storage microsoft provides many programming interfaces and many sdks so it's very easy for your developers to use table storage when building solutions in azure which brings me to azure file storage this service is similar to blob storage as we already said

the blob is synonym for file so what's the difference between blob storage and file storage let's talk about the semantic differences first in file storage instead of blobs you store files instead of containers you have shares and instead of blob storage you have file storage so semantically they're pretty much identical they work almost identical the only difference is the way you access them in case of file storage you access your shares via smb protocol so this is a simple file share service you might remember file shares when you go to for instance your windows pc

right click on your desktop and select map network drive when you do it it will appear in your pc just like any other drive on your machine except it's a remote drive somewhere on some sort of servers in this case that's exactly what azure file storage is for so azure file storage service is a service that allows you to store files files that will be accessed for share drive protocols whether you will use windows or linux machines you can take advantage of file storage service there are two common scenarios that this service was designed for

first one is extension of the on-premise file shares so if your company already has file shares that are used internally and they just need to extend those file shares with more space they can leverage azure file storage to do that and the second very common use case is lift and shift lift and shift means that you already have existing applications and you don't want to redesign those applications to take advantage of blob storage but you still want to extend or move files to azure in this case you use azure file storage to mount it as

a local drive you point your application to the local drive they use native functionalities but in the end this share is in azure so automatically your files are saved to azure this gives you ability to take advantage of azure features without any need to read these in your existing applications and pretty much that's the major difference between the file storage you use file storage if you need that shared drive protocol if not you design your applications and use blob storage which brings me to azure storage account all the services that we learned about today blob

storage cable storage new storage and file storage are part of the bigger service called azure storage account storage account is simply a collection of services including those four that we just learned right now they are designed to allow customers to store files messages and semi-structured data in azure very easily very effectively and at high scale and that high scale is quite high we're talking up to petabytes of data but not only it scales very high it also has high durability we're talking about 11 9 so if you pick the lowest replication on azure storage gun

which is locally redundant storage by default this provides you 11 9's of durability the chance that you lose your data is astronomically low you could pretty much say impossible but we all know nothing is impossible but if you want you can pick even better replication settings going up to 69th of durability and by default this is the cheapest per gigabyte storage in azure and if you take advantage of blob storage tiers you can get very low price for very large amounts of data let me show you how easy it is to take advantage of azure

storage account inside of the azure portal you can go to the menu on the left hand side select create a resource to go to the marketplace an azure storage account can be found on the first place in a most commonly used services section when you select it you need to select a resource group let's create a new one i will call this az900 storage let's hit ok and now we need to provide the name for our azure service in this case i will call it az900 demo storage as you see this name is already taken

so i need to pick up a new name so i will just call it az900 storage 123b looks like this name is available now i will choose location for me this will be west europe region you can pick some other stuff like performance account kind replication settings and below you have access tier those are the storage tiers that we're talking about and this is where you pick up the default storage tier so that means all the files that you will upload to this storage will take this setting by default in this case all the files

that we will upload will be put into hot storage tier without any additional setting let's leave that as is let's review and create and hit create creation of storage account takes about a minute so we can wait for that after the service has been provisioned we can select go to the resource to review our storage account settings by default on the first screen in the essentials section you will see the four services that we just talked about the containers is the blob storage we have also file shares which is azure file storage we have tables

which is the table storage and the queues for now let's move and open containers and let's create new container this is a top level bucket for our files let's call it demo and hit ok we can now open demo container and upload some sort of file just pick anything from your drive hit upload and you're done your file now is in the cloud so as you can see usage of blob storage from user perspective is simple so let's move back to the storage account go back to the resource and let's select file shares in this

demo i want to create a small file share in azure and mount it to my local machine by selecting new file share giving a name demo share giving it a quota of maximum 10 gigabytes hitting create now to mount the share i need to select demo share and open it inside of demo share i need to select connect button and in here microsoft provides me out of the box scripts for each different operating system for windows this is a powershell simply select copy to clipboard switch to your windows machine open powershell and just paste in

the script by default this script will first test the connectivity and then mount the storage if everything worked correctly you will see message on the screen that the new share was mounted you can verify that by going to your computer to this pc and you will see new share attached you can even open that share and create a small file like a demo txt file let's call it demo if you did it you can now go back to azure portal to verify that this file was saved directly in the cloud post this panel hit refresh

and as you see you are able to attach a share and save file directly to azure just like a normal file on your normal drive before we move back to presentation let me show you one more quick demo with storage account let's go back to the resource and open storage explorer it's a web tool that allows us to review everything on the storage account all the blob containers all the file shares and even tables so let me create new table called demo table to hold my semi-structured data hit ok and the table is created as

the table is created you can start adding new rows by default each row has to have a compound key containing partition key and row key this value has to be unique but you can add additional properties like name in this case let's call it adam and insert a data once you do it you can add additional row let's add one more row and let's change name to surname and type martrak which is my surname and assign values for partition and row key to have unique compound key and we can hit insert notice that we are

not validating any kind of schema so the first row could have name second row could have surname there's no validation for the semi-structured data of course azure storage account doesn't end here and it has a lot of a lot of additional features that allows you to take advantage of this highly scalable storage in the cloud but for now let's move back to presentation our last service for today is azure disk storage azure disk storage is used for virtual machines when it comes to windows virtual machines you probably remember that you have multiple partitions like c

d e etc etc all those partitions are stored on one or more disks in azure this is done via disk storage service this storage service is simply set at disk emulation in the cloud allowing customers to attach a persistent storage for their virtual machines both for operating systems and their application data and disks in azure come with different sizes different types so you can pick either ssd or hdd in different performance tiers of course the bigger and the more performant the disk is the higher the price but it's still good that you have that choice

because you can make the choice to grab this slower disk for your non-critical systems and development environments and lastly disk storage allows customers to store their disk in unmanaged or managed form unmanaged means each disk is stored as a file on a blob storage it's called unmanaged because it is not managed by cloud provider customers are responsible for managing those blobs and those drives and the storage accounts or you can use second more popular option now which are managed disks that means microsoft is managing all the blob storage all the files and all the services

behind the scenes giving you a separate resource called manage disk which not only hides the complexity of managing the disk themselves but gives you some additional features which is very nice to have so let's do a quick summary azure storage account is highly scalable and highly durable group of services for unstructured and semi-structured data management so if you need general purpose file storage that fits pretty much any scenario in azure you can use azure blob storage if you need to take advantage of file shares in the cloud for lift and shift scenarios or extension of

your on-premise file shares you can use azure file storage additionally if you're building scalable asynchronous processing architectures you can use azure queue storage to deliver a service for very small messages and process offloading if you need to have a small simple yet scalable nosql database in azure to store your semi-structured data then you can take advantage of azure table storage and lastly if you have virtual machines and you need to provide a persistent drive for those virtual machines a simple disk emulation service in the cloud then you take advantage of azure disk storage as always

go to my website to check some extra material study guides practice tests and in this episode i also attached a lot of my videos covering those storage services in more detail now that we have covered basics of azure storage and how to store our unstructured and semi-structured data we can move to databases so in the next episode we will get overview of azure database services for now that's it if you like the video hit thumbs up leave a comment and subscribe to support the channel to follow to the next episode either follow the playlist or

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