Storage Services

Storage Services - a category of services in Azure that provides cheap, infinite file storage

Azure Storage - a cheap place to store files, along with basic table and queue features; pay per Gigabyte; IaaS

Storage Account - provides access to your Azure storage resources

Managed Disk - slightly more expensive, but this will allow Azure to provide some additional features that reduce the burden of managing your own storage account; pay per month for a provided GB limit; IaaS

Backup and Recovery Storage - as you’d expect, this is a specialized storage account that will manage your backups from virtual machines and perform recoveries

Storage Types

Blob Storage - is Microsoft’s object storage solution for Azure cloud

Disk Storage - block storage for Azure virtual machines

File Storage (Azure Files) - a managed cloud file share accessible by SMB and NFS protocol

Queue Storage - it’s for storing large numbers of messages

Storage Tools

AzCopy - a CLI tool for copying blobs or files

Azure Storage Explorer - a web GUI tool for managing Azure storage accounts

Azure File Sync - a tool for centralizing file shares

Storage Tiers

Storage Tiers - optimized frequency access tiers for storage indicated as:

• hot
• cool
• archive

Storage Redundancy

Locally redundant storage (LRS) - data is synchronously replicated three times within a local single data center in the primary region (three copies, one zone)

Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) - data is synchronously replicated across three AZs in the primary region (three copies, three zones, three DCs, one copy in each zone/DC)

Geo-redundant storage (GRS) - data is replicated three times using LRS, then it’s replicated three times to a single DC in a secondary region (LRS + LRS, six copies, two DCs, two regions, three copies in each DC/region)

Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS) - data is replicated using ZRS, then the data is replicated three times in a secondary region using LRS (ZRS + LRS, six copies, three DCs, three AZs, two regions)