Designed for:

• Serving images or documents directly to a browser.
• Storing files for distributed access.
• Streaming video and audio.
• Writing to log files.
• Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.
• Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service.

Types of storage accounts

• Standard: Standard general-purpose v2
• Premium: higher performance by using solid-state drives

Access tiers

• Hot: highest storage costs, but the lowest access costs
• Cool: storing large amounts of data that is infrequently accessed and stored for at least 30 days
• Archive: most cost-effective option for storing data, but accessing that data is more expensive than accessing data in the hot or cool tiers

Blobs

• Block blobs: store text and binary data, up to about 190.7 TB
• Append blobs: logging data from virtual machines
• Page blobs: store random access files up to 8 TB in size,store virtual hard drive (VHD) files and serve as disks for Azure virtual machines.

Storage encryption for data at rest

Encryption key management:

• Microsoft-managed keys
• customer-managed
• customer-provided

Data in an Azure Storage account is always replicated three times in the primary region

• Locally redundant storage (LRS): Copies your data synchronously three times within a single physical location in the primary region.
• Zone-redundant storage (ZRS): Copies your data synchronously across three Azure availability zones in the primary region

Redundancy in a secondary region

• Geo-redundant storage (GRS) copies your data synchronously three times within a single physical location in the primary region using LRS. It then copies your data asynchronously to a single physical location in the secondary region.

• Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS) copies your data synchronously across three Azure availability zones in the primary region using ZRS. It then copies your data asynchronously to a single physical location in the secondary region. Within the secondary region, your data is copied synchronously three times using LRS.

Data Proctection

• Container soft delete
• Blob versioning (every write operation to a blob in that account results in the creation of a new version.)
• Blob soft delete, to restore a blob, snapshot, or version that has been deleted (When blob soft delete is enabled, overwriting a blob automatically creates a soft-deleted snapshot)

Versioning is not supported for accounts that have a hierarchical namespace.

Create the block blob storage account

az storage account create --resource-group az204-blob-rg --name \
<myStorageAcct> --location <myLocation> \
--kind BlockBlobStorage --sku Premium_LRS

Data lifecycle

Azure Blob storage lifecycle management offers a rich, rule-based policy for General Purpose v2 and Blob storage accounts.

• Transition blobs to a cooler storage tier (hot to cool, hot to archive, or cool to - archive) to optimize for performance and cost
• Delete blobs at the end of their lifecycle
• Define rules to be run once per day at the storage account level
• Apply rules to containers or a subset of blobs (using prefixes as filters)

Data stored in a premium block blob storage account cannot be tiered to Hot, Cool, or Archive using Set Blob Tier or using Azure Blob Storage lifecycle management

To move data, you must synchronously copy blobs from the block blob storage account to the Hot tier in a different account

Sample Rule

{
  "rules": [
    {
      "name": "ruleFoo",
      "enabled": true,
      "type": "Lifecycle",
      "definition": {
        "filters": {
          "blobTypes": ["blockBlob"],
          "prefixMatch": ["container1/foo"]
        },
        "actions": {
          "baseBlob": {
            "tierToCool": { "daysAfterModificationGreaterThan": 30 },
            "tierToArchive": { "daysAfterModificationGreaterThan": 90 },
            "delete": { "daysAfterModificationGreaterThan": 2555 }
          },
          "snapshot": {
            "delete": { "daysAfterCreationGreaterThan": 90 }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Rule actions

• tierToCool
• enableAutoTierToHotFromCool
• tierToArchive
• delete

If you define more than one action on the same blob, lifecycle management applies the least expensive action to the blob.

Add a lifecycle management policy with Azure CLI

az storage account management-policy create \
    --account-name <storage-account> \
    --policy @policy.json \
    --resource-group <resource-group>

Rehydrate blob data from the archive tier

• Copy an archived blob to an online tier CopyBlob or Copy Blob from URL
• Change a blob's access tier to an online tier Set Blob Tier

Rehydration priority

x-ms-rehydrate-priority header

• Standard priority: may take up to 15 hours.
• High priority: in under one hour for objects under 10 GB in size.

Changing a blob's tier doesn't affect its last modified time

Create Blob storage resources by using the .NET client library

create a storage account

Your storage account name must be unique within Azure.

az storage account create --resource-group az204-blob-rg --name <myStorageAcct> --location <myLocation> --sku Standard_LRS

Classes in the Azure.Storage.Blobs namespace

• BlobClient
• BlobClientOptions
• BlobContainerClient
• BlobContainerClient
• BlobUriBuilder

BlobServiceClient blobServiceClient = new BlobServiceClient(storageConnectionString);

Create the container and return a container client object

BlobContainerClient containerClient = await blobServiceClient.CreateBlobContainerAsync(containerName);

Get a reference to the blob

BlobClient blobClient = containerClient.GetBlobClient(fileName);

List the blobs in a container

containerClient.GetBlobsAsync()

Download the blob's contents

BlobDownloadInfo download = await blobClient.DownloadAsync();

Retrieve container properties

var properties = await container.GetPropertiesAsync();

Set container properties

IDictionary<string, string> metadata = new Dictionary<string, string>();

// Add some metadata to the container.
metadata.Add("docType", "textDocuments");
metadata.Add("category", "guidance");

// Set the container's metadata.
await container.SetMetadataAsync(metadata);

// Set the container's metadata.
await container.SetMetadataAsync(metadata);

var properties = await container.GetPropertiesAsync();

Set and retrieve properties and metadata for blob resources by using REST

x-ms-meta-name:string-value

Retrieving properties and metadata For Containers:

GET/HEAD https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer?restype=container

For blobs:

GET/HEAD https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer/myblob?comp=metadata

Setting Metadata Headers

For Containers:

PUT https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer?comp=metadata&restype=container

for Blobs:

PUT https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer/myblob?comp=metadata

HTTP headers supported on containers

• ETag
• Last-Modified

headers supported on blobs include

• ETag
• Last-Modified
• Content-Length
• Content-Type
• Content-MD5
• Content-Encoding
• Content-Language
• Cache-Control
• Origin
• Range