Azure provides you with the ability to create SMB shares with an Azure storage account. These SMB shares act the same as local on-premises SMB shares you used in Chapter 9, Managing Network Shares. The key difference is how you create them and the credentials you use to access the shares.
Before an SMB client can access data held in an SMB share, the SMB client needs to authenticate with the SMB server. With Windows based shares, you either use a userid/password credential, or in a domain environment, the SMB client utilizes Kerberos to authenticate. With Azure, you use the storage account name as the userid and the storage account key as the password.
The storage account key provides you with two keys (imaginatively named key1 and key2). The value of either key is a valid password for Azure SMB file shares. You have two keys to enable you to do regular key rotation. If your application uses the value of key1, you can change the application to use the key2...
