Configuring Blob Storage

We have talked a lot about infrastructure in Azure, covering topics such as Azure Virtual Machines, (VMs), virtual networks (VNets), load balancing, and disks. That knowledge will help you build and manage solutions based on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) services in Azure. This time, we’ll focus on a slightly different type of service – a managed storage solution for data called Azure Blob Storage.

Information presented in this chapter will enable you to explore architecture that requires less typical administrative work (such as managing the OS, updates, and software) and focuses more on providing business value thanks to a much easier infrastructure setup and smaller cognitive load.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Exploring storage accounts, containers, and Binary Large Objects (blobs)
• Configuring access tiers in Blob Storage
• Configuring lifecycle and replication in Blob Storage...

Technical requirements

For the exercises from this chapter, you’ll need the following:

• The Azure CLI (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/install-azure-cli)
• A command-line tool of any kind (either available in your operating system or your favorite one)
• AzCopy (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-use-azcopy-v10)

The Code in Action video for this book can be viewed at: https://packt.link/GTX9F

Exploring storage accounts, containers, and blobs

In Azure, there’s a variety of different services that allow you to work with data. Depending on your needs, there are various databases (Azure SQL Database or Azure Cosmos DB), orchestrators (Azure Data Factory, or ADF), or data ingestion streams (Azure Event Hubs or Azure Stream Analytics). What’s more, even Azure VMs, which we covered in Chapters 3-8, need a storage solution where they can keep their data. All those services have one thing in common – they leverage or integrate with one of the most important Azure services called Azure Storage.

Lots of other available services use Azure Storage as one of the key components they are based on. You can think about that service as a part of Azure’s service backbone (Azure VMs can also be included in that category). Why is Azure Storage that important? Let’s characterize its capabilities:

• It’s a general-purpose storage, meaning it can...

Configuring access tiers in Blob Storage

Blob Storage is a service that you can use to store any data, meaning there are not many various parameters that refer to the uploaded files in terms of their structure or characteristics. However, there are a few different use cases that can be covered by this service:

• Generic storage for applications
• Storage for backup files
• Storage for archived files
• Storage for logs

Note that some of those scenarios may expect different performance tiers as the way uploaded files are modified and used will be different. For instance, let’s say you’re using Azure Storage for storing backup files. Backups are files that in most cases are quite big, but what’s more important is that most of the time, you just upload them and rarely use them. It’s a perfect example of a storage solution called cold storage. With Azure Storage, you can develop a solution that can be treated as either hot or cold storage....

Configuring lifecycle and replication in Blob Storage

Each object stored in Blob Storage can have its own rules for lifecycle. What’s more, the storage account enables you to configure replications for all objects stored. In this section, we’ll focus on managing those concepts from the administrator’s point of view. To get started, we’ll revisit replication options to see what available operations there are to perform.

Replication of a storage account

When you create a storage account, you may decide the SKU used for it. The SKU parameter serves two purposes:

• Defines the selected performance tier
• Sets up the replication mode for the storage account

As with many services in Azure, Azure Storage is quite flexible, meaning it allows for reconfiguring some of its options after the creation of an instance. This also applies to replication mode, which can be changed anytime with the following command:

az storage account update --name...

Uploading blobs to Blob Storage

As Blob Storage acts as a generic storage solution for files, there needs to be a way to upload files to created containers. Fortunately, there are several different ways to perform upload operations to a storage account – they can be used in a couple of different scenarios:

• Using an SDK will be helpful when working in a traditional development environment.
• The Azure CLI could be leveraged when writing automation scripts. The same applies to Azure PowerShell.
• You can also use additional tools such as AzCopy if you need to work with larger datasets.

In this section, we’ll focus on the Azure CLI and AzCopy for examples of performing upload operations. Let’s start with the former.

Using the Azure CLI to upload a file

Uploading a file using the Azure CLI can be performed using the following command:

az storage blob upload -f <path-to-file> -c <container-name> -n <blob-name>

However...

Summary

With Chapter 9, we started another area useful for Azure administrators, which is storage. Information contained in this chapter will be helpful on many occasions, as Blob Storage is one of the most popular services used in Azure thanks to its simplicity, flexibility, and decent performance. You learned important topics such as storage accounts, containers, and blobs, including their access tiers, replication, and lifecycle rules. We also discussed different options for performing upload operations to Blob Storage.

In the next chapter, you’ll learn about Azure File Service, which is another service offered by Azure Storage. This time, we’ll use that Azure service to set up a file share that can be used by people inside your organization as a replacement for standard on-premises shares. We’ll also discuss the File Sync feature, which can be helpful to automate the management of the service.