Delving into Azure Storage

This chapter covers Microsoft Azure Storage services and how to work with them. For a better understanding of what is going on behind the scenes, the Azure Storage architecture and how to secure your Azure Storage will be covered too. The best practices that need to be followed to have a highly available application are also covered. Then, we will go through client libraries, which can be used as a way of managing Azure Storage. Finally, all manually created tasks will be automated using PowerShell and the Azure CLI 2.0.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Azure Storage services
• Understanding the Azure Storage architecture
• Securing Azure Storage
• Storage design for highly available applications
• Understanding client libraries
• Automating tasks

Azure Storage services

Azure Storage has multiple services that would fit most scenarios. At the moment, there are four types of Azure Storage services, which are as follows:

• Blob storage
• Table storage
• Queue storage
• File storage

Each of these services can be used for different scenarios, which we will cover in detail shortly.

Blob storage

Blob stands for binary large object. This type of service can store almost everything since it stores unstructured data, such as documents, files, images, VHDs, and so on.

Using the Azure Blob storage service makes you capable of storing everything we have just mentioned, and able to access them from anywhere using different access methods, such as URLs, REST APIs, or even one of the Azure...

Understanding the Azure Storage architecture

Learning how to work with Azure Storage and how to design it to fit your solution is everyone's purpose, but learning what is going on behind the scenes and what every piece means is what makes you an expert.

Azure Storage is a distributed storage software stack built by Microsoft. The storage access architecture consists of the following three layers:

• Front-End layer
• Partition layer
• Stream layer

Front-End layer

The Front-End layer is responsible for receiving incoming requests, their authentication, and authorization, and then delivers them to a partition server in the Partition layer.

You may wonder, how does the frontend know which partition server to forward each request...

Securing Azure Storage

It's great to know how to manage Azure Storage, and even to follow best practices throughout the process. However, securing your storage should be your biggest concern, especially because storage is the base on which all your Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) services run.

Throughout this topic, we will cover the following methods to secure Azure Storage:

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
• Access keys
• Shared access signature (SAS)

RBAC

Giving every user the exact permissions they need should be your first concern in order to avoid a complete disaster if a user's credentials were exposed.

RBAC would help you with segregating duties within your team; specifically, everyone would only be granted...

Storage design for highly available applications

What we have covered so far shows the importance of Azure Storage as a cornerstone for building whatever you want to build on Azure. Therefore, in this topic, we will cover some of the most important features you have to implement in order to be able to design highly available storage for your applications.

The following points should be our main focus when designing a highly available storage solution:

• RA-GRS
• Azure Backup
• Azure Site Recovery
• Premium Storage

RA-GRS

RA-GRS is the highest durable replication type, as was covered in the last chapter. Not only this, but it also gives you read access to your storage in another region, which may reduce latency if you have to query...

Understanding client libraries

When we created our storage account, the name of the account took the following format storageaccount.core.windows.net.

So, it is no surprise that all the storage service's endpoints took the following format:

• Blob: storageaccount.blob.core.windows.net
• Table: storageaccount.table.core.windows.net
• Queue: storageaccount.queue.core.windows.net
• File: storageaccount.file.core.windows.net

These endpoints are exposed through REST APIs to be accessed by any platform using HTTP.

That is why Microsoft provides several client libraries to give developers a high level of control over Azure Storage services.

Azure Storage supports many client libraries for many platforms, such as:

• .NET
• Java
• Node.js
• PHP
• Ruby
• Python
• C++
• iOS
• Android

Microsoft keeps adding new client libraries, so don't be surprised if you find that new client libraries have been added...

Automating tasks

As usual when we reach the end of a chapter, we will work on automating the tasks that we have done manually. So, let's get started.

Creating Blob storage using PowerShell

In this topic, we will cover how to create Blob storage that everyone has read/write access to in the storage account we created in the last chapter:

$ContainerName = packtpubbs

$SAK = Get-AzureRmStorageAccountKey -StorageAccountName "packtpubsaps" -ResourceGroupName packtpub

$SAK = $SAK | Where {$_.KeyName -like “key1”}

$SC = New-AzureStorageContext -StorageAccountName packtpubsaps -StorageAccountKey $SAK.Value

New-AzureStorageContainer -Name $ContainerName -Permission Container -Context $SC

Set-AzureStorageBlobContent...

Summary

So far, we have gone through Azure Storage in detail, illustrating Azure Storage services, its architecture, and even how to secure it. Then, we proposed some storage design best practices to keep your application highly available, and since Azure Storage is not only managed through the portal, Azure PowerShell, and Azure CLI, we briefly talked about the client libraries that are most suitable for developers. At the end of the chapter, we automated the tasks that have been implemented so far.

Next, Azure Virtual Machines and their dependency on Azure Storage will be covered in detail. Therefore, the knowledge gained in this chapter is required for a better understanding of the coming chapter.