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4.1.1. Develop Solutions that Use Azure Blob Storage

First Principle: Azure Blob storage is Microsoft’s cloud-based object storage. Its core purpose is to provide highly scalable, durable, and cost-effective storage for massive amounts of unstructured data, optimizing for diverse access patterns and data protection.

What It Is: Azure Blob storage is Microsoft’s cloud-based object storage, designed for massive amounts of unstructured data—such as documents, images, videos, and backups. It is highly scalable, durable, and accessible over HTTP/S.

Visual: "Azure Blob Storage Hierarchy and Tiers"
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Hierarchy:
  • "Storage Account": The top-level resource; all storage is organized under it.
  • "Containers": Like folders within a "storage account", used to group "blobs".
  • "Blobs": The actual data objects/files stored.
"Blob Types":
  • "Block blobs": Store text/binary data; ideal for large file uploads, streaming, and backups. Most common type.
  • "Append blobs": Optimized for append operations; best for logging scenarios where new data is continuously added.
  • "Page blobs": Support random read/write access; used for "VHDs (Virtual Hard Disks) and Azure virtual machine disks".
"Access Tiers":
  • "Hot": For frequently accessed data; higher storage cost, lower access cost.
  • "Cool": For infrequently accessed data; lower storage cost, higher access cost, higher retrieval latency than Hot.
  • "Archive": For rarely accessed, long-term data; lowest storage cost, highest retrieval latency (hours).
Common Use Cases:
  • Serving static content (images, videos, documents) to web/mobile apps.
  • Backup and "disaster recovery" for various data types.
  • "Data lakes" for analytics and big data processing.
  • Storing logs and telemetry data.
  • Staging data for distributed processing.

Scenario: You need to store millions of user-uploaded images for a social media application. These images are frequently accessed initially but become less popular over time. You also need to store system logs that are appended to continuously.

Reflection Question: How does Azure Blob storage’s flexibility in "blob types" (e.g., Block for images, Append for logs) and "access tiers" (Hot, Cool, Archive) fundamentally make it a core building block for modern, cloud-native applications requiring scalable, cost-effective, and durable storage for unstructured data?