Using Azure Storage - Tables, Queues, Files, and Blobs

PaaS in Azure is not only about App Services or containers. This particular cloud offers much more, especially when talking about different options for storage, messaging solutions, or monitoring. With services such as Event Hub, Azure Storage, or Application Insights, we're given a complete set of cloud components that offer great flexibility and simplify developing complete, scalable, and easy-to-maintain applications.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Using Azure Storage solutions
• Storing structured data with Azure Storage Tables
• Implementing fully managed file shares with Azure Storage Files
• Using queues with Azure Storage Queues
• Using Azure Storage Blobs for object storage

Technical requirements

To perform the exercises in this chapter, you will need the following:

• An Azure subscription
• Visual Studio 2017
• Azure Storage Explorer, available at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/features/storage-explorer/
• Azure Storage Emulator, available at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/

Using Azure Storage in a solution

Most applications cannot work without a storage solution. This can be any kind of database—relational, document, file, or graph. Most of them require some skills to be able to configure and start working with them. For now, we have covered one storage solution available in Azure, namely Azure Cosmos DB, which is a serverless database, where the only thing needed was to set a correct throughput value. Of course, Azure offers much more in the way of storage services, of which the most common is Azure Storage. It is a PaaS cloud component (though some define it as serverless, mostly because of a lack of servers) which can be used in four different ways. In this chapter, we will cover all of them, so you will be familiar with their capabilities and features.

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Storing data with Azure Storage Tables

We will start our journey with Azure Storage capabilities by learning something about Table Storage. If you want to store unstructured data with almost limitless capacity and with high demands regarding availability and durability, this service is for you. In this section, you will learn how to start developing applications using Table Storage and the best practices for storing data and achieving the best performance for both writing and reading it. You will also see how to efficiently query it, and what is important when designing services using this Azure Storage capability.

Creating an Azure Storage service

To get started, we have to actually create an instance of Azure Storage. To...

Implementing fully managed file shares with Azure Files

When in need of creating a file share, which can be accessed by different people, you often have to either buy some hardware, which will be set up and configured for such functionality, or use third-party solutions, which can be hard to customize, or expensive. With Azure Storage, you can quickly develop a solution that is almost limitless in terms of capacity, offers industry standard protocols, and can be quickly provisioned, and ready to use.

Azure Files concepts

Azure Files has some basic concepts that create the whole picture of a service. In fact, it is designed to replace current on-premise file servers in terms of functionality and performance. The main difference...

Queues in Azure Queue Storage

Azure Storage—besides being a service for storing many different kinds of data—can be used also as a queue. Queue Storage is another capability that allows you to quickly develop a solution that requires a simple queue solution, and additionally is able to store in a queue millions of messages without affecting performance. In this section, you will see how to develop applications using Queue Storage and what is important when using this feature. Additionally, I assume that you already have a storage account. If not, take a look at the Storing data with Azure Storage Tables section, where I described the process of creating an account.

Queue Storage features

In general, Queue Storage...

Object storage solution – Azure Storage Blobs

The last capability of Azure Storage is Blob Storage. In the previous sections, we were using this service to store unstructured data using Table Storage, push messages to a queue with Queue Storage, and create file shares, thanks to File Storage. In the last section of this chapter, we will focus on developing solutions that store so-called blobs. You may wonder what exactly a blob is—well, there is no single definition for that. In general. blobs are files of different types, such as text files, images, or audio. You will see how to use them in your applications, how to secure them, and how you can achieve the maximum performance.

Blob Storage concepts

Before we...

Summary

In this chapter, you have learned some basics regarding one of the most important services in Azure—Azure Storage. We developed a few solutions for Tables, Queues, Files, and Blobs—each enabling you to do different things, from asynchronous message processing to creating file shares. You also read about different redundancy models and how reliable and durable this particular service is. In the Further reading section, you will find plenty of additional resources, which will allow you to build even more skills for working with this Azure service, such as Table Storage patterns, performance targets, and a REST API reference. In the following chapters, you will learn something about data processing services, such as Azure Event Hub and Azure Stream Analytics.

Questions

1. What tiers are available during account creation when selecting Blob as an account type?
2. What must you include in a query against Table Storage to achieve the maximum performance?
3. What are the available redundancy models for storage accounts?
4. What is the difference between blob and file storage?
5. Can you store binary files using Blob Storage?
6. How long does a message in Queue Storage live before it is removed?
7. What is the maximum size of a message in Queue Storage?
8. What is the maximum size of the PartitionKey column value?
9. What concurrency model is implemented in Table Storage?
10. What is the difference between Azure Files storage and on-premise filesystem?

Further reading

• Disk storage: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/about-disks-and-vhds
• SAS token reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-dotnet-shared-access-signature-part-1
• ARM vs classic deployment: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/resource-manager-deployment-model
• Table Storage data model: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/Understanding-the-Table-Service-Data-Model
• Blob Storage pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/
• File Storage performance targets: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/files/storage-files-scale-targets
• Guidelines for Table Storage: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/tables/table-storage-design-guidelines