This is part 2 of the blogs about some of the components on the Microsoft Azure platform, like app service, storage, databases, load balancer, containers, Kubernetes, compute, security and many more. I am using all the letters of alphabet to do this. This is two of twenty six, B for Azure Blob Storage.

B for Azure Blob Storage.

What is Azure Blob Storage?

Azure blob storage is object based storage offering for the Microsoft cloud. Blob storage is ideal for storing large chunks of unstructured data. A good example of unstructured data are files that often used in multimedia, word documents, photos, movies, websites and other types social media content.

The Blob Concepts

Container: Container are used for grouping sets of blobs this is similar to the pod concept in Kubernetes. All blobs must be in container. An Azure account can have an unlimited number of containers and container can store an unlimited number of blobs.

Blob: File of any type or size. Azure Blob Storage has three different types of blobs: append blobs, block blobs, and page blobs.Block blobs are used for storing binary and text files, like documents and media files.

Append blobs are something like block blobs as they are made up of blocks, they are ideal for append operations, they are a very good fit for logging scenarios.

Page blobs can be up to 1 Terabyte in size and are very useful for frequent read/write operations. Azure Virtual Machines use page blobs as Operating Systems and data disks.

This is a YouTube video of how to create a storage account on Azure and create a Blob Container, upload a file to the container and create a file share.