Chapter Two
Storage
Object, block, and file storage under one account model, plus backup. The shapes are not interchangeable — choosing block where you needed object, or a premium tier where standard would do, is expensive to undo.
Core Terminology
Azure groups most storage under a single account resource. These terms recur across the chapter.
Storage Account
The namespace and billing boundary for Blob, File, Queue, and Table data. Its name forms the endpoint hostname and must be globally unique.
Access Tier
Hot, Cool, Cold, or Archive — a per-blob trade between storage price and access price. Hot is cheap to read; Archive is cheap to keep but slow and costly to retrieve.
Redundancy
How many copies Azure keeps and where: LRS within one datacenter, ZRS across zones, GRS across Regions. More durability, more cost.
Managed Disk
A block-storage volume Azure manages as a resource and attaches to a VM. Tiers run from Standard HDD to Premium and Ultra SSD.
Blob
A binary object in Blob Storage — block blobs for files, append blobs for logs, page blobs for disk images.
SAS Token
A shared access signature: a signed URL granting scoped, time-limited access to storage without sharing the account key.
Services in This Chapter
Service 09
Blob Storage
Massively scalable object storage for unstructured data — backups, media, data-lake content, static sites. Tiered pricing from Hot to Archive.
Service 10
Managed Disks
Block storage for VMs, managed as a resource. Standard HDD through Ultra SSD; the durable root and data volumes behind every VM.
Service 11
Azure Files
Fully managed SMB and NFS file shares in the cloud, mountable from VMs and on-premises. Lift-and-shift for apps that expect a file system.
Service 12
Azure NetApp Files
Enterprise NFS and SMB on NetApp hardware, with sub-millisecond latency tiers. For SAP, HPC, and databases that need extreme file performance.
Service 13
Data Lake Storage
Blob Storage with a hierarchical namespace and POSIX ACLs — the storage layer for analytics on Synapse, Databricks, and Spark.
Service 14
Storage Account
The account resource itself — Queues, Tables, redundancy, networking, and the security model that the other storage services sit inside.
Service 15
Azure Backup
Centralized, policy-driven backup for VMs, files, SQL, and on-premises servers into a Recovery Services vault. Retention and restore without standing up infrastructure.