Yesterday we were out on a limb. Today we are going to be skating on thin ice. Not only do I know less about Azure than AWS but Microsoft has significantly different thoughts and solutions on storage than the other two cloud vendors. First, let’s look at the available literature on Azure storage

• Microsoft Azure Storage Essentials
• Cloud Computing with the Windows Azure Platform
• Developing Cloud Applications with Windows Azure Storage
• Introducing Windows Azure For IT Professionals
• Programming Windows Azure

There are four types of storage available with Azure storage services; blob storage, table storage, queue storage, and file storage. Blob storage is similar to the Oracle Block Storage or Amazon S3 storage. It provides blocks of pages that can be used for documents, large log files, backups, databases, videos, and so on. Blobs are objects placed inside of containers that have characteristics and access controls. Table storage offers the ability to store key/attribute entries in a semi-structured dataset similar to a NoSQL database. The queue storage provides a messaging system so that you can buffer and sequence events between applications. The third and final is file based storage similar to dropbox or google docs. You can read and write files and file shares and access them through SMB file mounts on Windows systems.

Azure storage does give you the option of deciding upon your reliability model by selecting the replication model. The options are locally triple redundant storage, replication between two data centers, replication between different geographical locations, or read access geo-redundant storage.

Since blob storage is probably more relevant for what we are looking for, let’s dive a little deeper into this type of storage. Blobs can be allocated either as block blobs or page blobs. Block blobs are aggregation of blocks that can be allocated in different sizes. Page blobs are of smaller fixed size chunks of 512 bytes for each page blob. Page blogs are the foundation of virtual machines and are used by default to support operating systems running in a virtual machine. Blobs are allocated into containers and inherit the characteristics of the container. Blobs are accessed via REST apis. The address of a blob is formatted as http://(account-name).blob.core.windows.net/(container-name)/(blob-name). Note that the account name is defined by the user. It is important to note that the account-name is not unique to your account. This is something that you create and Microsoft adds it to their DNS so that your ip address on the internet can be found. You can’t choose simple names like test, testing, my, or other common terms because they have been allocated by someone else.

To begin the process we need to log into the Azure portal and browser for the Storage create options.

Once we find the storage management page we have to click the plus button to add a new storage resource.

It is important to create a unique name. This name will be used as an extension of the REST api and goes in front of the server address. This name must be unique so picking something like the word “test” will fail since someone else has already selected it.

In our example, we select wwpf which is an abbreviation for a non-profit that I work with, who we play for. We next need to select the replication policy to make sure that the data is highly available.

Once we are happy with the name, replication policy, resource group, and payment method, we can click Create. It takes a while so we see a deploying message at the top of the screen.

When we are finished we should see a list of storage containers that we have created. We can dive into the containers and see what services each contains.

Note that we have the option of blob, table, queue, and files at this point. We will dive into the blob part of this to create raw blocks that can be used for backups, holding images, and generic file storage. Clicking on the blob services allows us to create a blob container.

Note that the format of the container name is critical. You can’t use special characters or capital letters. Make sure that you follow the naming convention for container names.

We are going to select a blob type container so that we have access to raw blocks.

When the container is created we can see the REST api point for the newly created storage.

We can examine the container properties by clicking on the properties button and looking at when it was created, lease information, file count, and other things related to container access rights.

The easiest way to access this newly created storage is to do the same thing that we did with Oracle Storage. We are going to use the CloudBerry Explorer. In this gui tool we will need to create an attachment to the account. Note that the tool used for Azure is different from the Oracle and Amazon tools. Each cost a little money and they are not the same tool unfortunately. They also only work on a Windows desktop which is challenging if you use a Mac of Linux desktop.

To figure out your access rights, go to the storage management interface and click on the key at the top right. This should open up a properties screen showing you the account and shared access key.

From here we can access the Azure blob storage and drag and drop files. We first add the account information then navigate to the blob container and can read and write objects.

In this example, we are looking at virtual images located on our desktop “E:\” drive and can drag and drop them into a blob container for use by an Azure compute engine.

In summary, Azure storage is very similar to Amazon S3 and Oracle Storage Cloud Services. The cost is similar. The way we access it is similar. The way we protect and restrict access to it is similar. We can address it through a REST api (which we did not detail) and can access it from our desktop or compute server running in Azure. Overall, storage in the cloud is storage in the cloud. You need to examine your use cases and see which storage type works best for you. Microsoft does have an on-premise gateway product called Azure SimpleStor which is similar to the Amazon Storage Gateway or the Oracle Cloud Storage Appliance. It is more of a hardware solution that attaches via iSCSI to existing servers.

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