hello everyone it's adam welcome back to microsoft azure fundamentals course as we

move along the core services we need to learn what are the options in azure to
store our unstructured and semi-structured data so let's dive right in [Music] so
let's talk about storage services in azure today we will learn about azure blob
storage and its storage tiers we will also talk about four other services called
file storage table storage queue storage and disk storage but before we move to
those services let's talk about general classification of data our first type is
structured data for structured data the idea is very simple that means your data is
laid out so nicely that you can describe it using specific schema so for each table
each row of the table you can define what are the properties of each row what are
the type of those properties and each row that you insert into that table has to
follow the schema additionally if you have multiple tables you can define
relationship between those tables this is the scenario that you typically see in
relational databases we will learn about those a little bit more in the next
episode additionally the second type of data is so-called semi-structure in this
case you still have a table but each row within this table do not need to follow
any specific schema that means each row can have its own unique properties the only
common property is usually some sort of key like an id column so you can say this
is a less formalized way of storing your data and lastly we have unstructured data
so data like images movies applications of binary application files txt files and
many more files files that do not follow structure that can represent pretty much
any kind of data which brings me to our first service azure blob storage we were
talking about this unstructured data and any kind of unstructured data can be
called blob blob stands for binary large object so any kind of file and you can put
those blobs into azure blob storage into something called container container is
just a bucket for multiple blobs you can have more than one container with an azure
blob storage and it is designed to allow both applications and users to work with
unstructured files in the cloud so azure blob storage is simply a service designed
to store any kind of file in azure remember the blob is just a synonym for file
because binary large object can represent anything really additionally there are
free storage tiers storage tiers allow microsoft to provide you better performance
and better pricing depending on how often do you access your data that's why there
are kindly free storage tiers and the first tier is so called hot you use this for
your frequently accessed data so if you're building web application and this web
application is serving images to your customers then this would be the storage tier
that you would use because hot storage tier provides the best performance for your
files but if your solution also store files that are accessed less frequently then
you can use cool tier with cool tier you are accepting lower availability and lower
performance for accessing your files while maintaining high durability and getting
significant discount for storing that data this is the perfect solution for storing
older versions and backups for your applications but if you have files that you
never plan to access like a very very long term backups let's say backup that you
need to keep for 10 years and you can use archive storage tier in this case the
availability is the lowest because retrieving that data might even take couple of
hours but the price is also the lowest you're getting 10 times the discount for
storing data in archived tier this really is the lowest price per gigabyte that you
can get when storing data in azure and that's pretty much it when it comes to blob
storage the second service that we'll learn about today is azure queue storage for
q storage it's a very small service but very significant when building applications
when you have application that has several tasks to be completed and each of those
three tasks might take some time to complete what you can do is output those into
azure queue as separate messages this will allow background processes and other
services to pick those messages from the queue at their own pace and let them
process those asynchronously this will not only offload your front-end application
but also allow you to pick more suited services for the background processing the
azure queue storage is a service that allows you to store small pieces of data so
called messages so that you can build scalable asynchronous processing solutions in
azure and that's pretty much it when it comes to queue storage a very simple
service with very specific use case in mind and it fits perfectly in this kind of
scenarios so the next service on our list is azure table storage this service was
designed with semi-structured data in mind so that both users and application can
output the semi-structured data form into tables and this table is part of table
storage of course you can have more than one table because table storage is just
like a database where you store multiple tables with your data just remember this
is a semi-structured database so there are no drawings no schemas just your data
and a simple storage this kind of databases are also called nosql databases to
summarize azure table storage is one of the storage services in azure for your
semi-structured data needs you can work insert update and operate on the data in a
semi-structured form so remember you use this kind of database when you don't need
stuff like foreign joins foreign keys relationships or when you don't need to
follow any strict schema additionally this service is designed for fast access so
if you would store petabytes of data you would still get your data within
milliseconds if you would use compound key to access that specific rows so it is
quite scalable even though it's a simple service and similarly to blob storage
microsoft provides many programming interfaces and many sdks so it's very easy for
your developers to use table storage when building solutions in azure which brings
me to azure file storage this service is similar to blob storage as we already said
the blob is synonym for file so what's the difference between blob storage and file
storage let's talk about the semantic differences first in file storage instead of
blobs you store files instead of containers you have shares and instead of blob
storage you have file storage so semantically they're pretty much identical they
work almost identical the only difference is the way you access them in case of
file storage you access your shares via smb protocol so this is a simple file share
service you might remember file shares when you go to for instance your windows pc
right click on your desktop and select map network drive when you do it it will
appear in your pc just like any other drive on your machine except it's a remote
drive somewhere on some sort of servers in this case that's exactly what azure file
storage is for so azure file storage service is a service that allows you to store
files files that will be accessed for share drive protocols whether you will use
windows or linux machines you can take advantage of file storage service there are
two common scenarios that this service was designed for first one is extension of
the on-premise file shares so if your company already has file shares that are used
internally and they just need to extend those file shares with more space they can
leverage azure file storage to do that and the second very common use case is lift
and shift lift and shift means that you already have existing applications and you
don't want to redesign those applications to take advantage of blob storage but you
still want to extend or move files to azure in this case you use azure file storage
to mount it as a local drive you point your application to the local drive they use
native functionalities but in the end this share is in azure so automatically your
files are saved to azure this gives you ability to take advantage of azure features
without any need to read these in your existing applications and pretty much that's
the major difference between the file storage you use file storage if you need that
shared drive protocol if not you design your applications and use blob storage
which brings me to azure storage account all the services that we learned about
today blob storage cable storage new storage and file storage are part of the
bigger service called azure storage account storage account is simply a collection
of services including those four that we just learned right now they are designed
to allow customers to store files messages and semi-structured data in azure very
easily very effectively and at high scale and that high scale is quite high we're
talking up to petabytes of data but not only it scales very high it also has high
durability we're talking about 11 9 so if you pick the lowest replication on azure
storage gun which is locally redundant storage by default this provides you 11 9's
of durability the chance that you lose your data is astronomically low you could
pretty much say impossible but we all know nothing is impossible but if you want
you can pick even better replication settings going up to 69th of durability and by
default this is the cheapest per gigabyte storage in azure and if you take
advantage of blob storage tiers you can get very low price for very large amounts
of data let me show you how easy it is to take advantage of azure storage account
inside of the azure portal you can go to the menu on the left hand side select
create a resource to go to the marketplace an azure storage account can be found on
the first place in a most commonly used services section when you select it you
need to select
a resource group let's create a new one i will call this az900 storage let's hit
ok and now we need to provide the name for our azure service in this case i will
call it az900 demo storage as you see this name is already taken so i need to pick
up a new name so i will just call it az900 storage 123b looks like this name is
available now i will choose location for me this will be west europe region you can
pick some other stuff like performance account kind replication settings and below
you have access tier those are the storage tiers that we're talking about and this
is where you pick up the default storage tier so that means all the files that you
will upload to this storage will take this setting by default in this case all the
files that we will upload will be put into hot storage tier without any additional
setting let's leave that as is let's review and create and hit create creation of
storage account takes about a minute so we can wait for that after the service has
been provisioned we can select go to the resource to review our storage account
settings by default on the first screen in the essentials section you will see the
four services that we just talked about the containers is the blob storage we have
also file shares which is azure file storage we have tables which is the table
storage and the queues for now let's move and open containers and let's create new
container this is a top level bucket for our files let's call it demo and hit ok we
can now open demo container and upload some sort of file just pick anything from
your drive hit upload and you're done your file now is in the cloud so as you can
see usage of blob storage from user perspective is simple so let's move back to the
storage account go back to the resource and let's select file shares in this demo i
want to create a small file share in azure and mount it to my local machine by
selecting new file share giving a name demo share giving it a quota of maximum 10
gigabytes hitting create now to mount the share i need to select demo share and
open it inside of demo share i need to select connect button and in here microsoft
provides me out of the box scripts for each different operating system for windows
this is a powershell simply select copy to clipboard switch to your windows machine
open powershell and just paste in the script by default this script will first test
the connectivity and then mount the storage if everything worked correctly you will
see message on the screen that the new share was mounted you can verify that by
going to your computer to this pc and you will see new share attached you can even
open that share and create a small file like a demo txt file let's call it demo if
you did it you can now go back to azure portal to verify that this file was saved
directly in the cloud post this panel hit refresh and as you see you are able to
attach a share and save file directly to azure just like a normal file on your
normal drive before we move back to presentation let me show you one more quick
demo with storage account let's go back to the resource and open storage explorer
it's a web tool that allows us to review everything on the storage account all the
blob containers all the file shares and even tables so let me create new table
called demo table to hold my semi-structured data hit ok and the table is created
as the table is created you can start adding new rows by default each row has to
have a compound key containing partition key and row key this value has to be
unique but you can add additional properties like name in this case let's call it
adam and insert a data once you do it you can add additional row let's add one more
row and let's change name to surname and type martrak which is my surname and
assign values for partition and row key to have unique compound key and we can hit
insert notice that we are not validating any kind of schema so the first row could
have name second row could have surname there's no validation for the semi-
structured data of course azure storage account doesn't end here and it has a lot
of a lot of additional features that allows you to take advantage of this highly
scalable storage in the cloud but for now let's move back to presentation our last
service for today is azure disk storage azure disk storage is used for virtual
machines when it comes to windows virtual machines you probably remember that you
have multiple partitions like c d e etc etc all those partitions are stored on one
or more disks in azure this is done via disk storage service this storage service
is simply set at disk emulation in the cloud allowing customers to attach a
persistent storage for their virtual machines both for operating systems and their
application data and disks in azure come with different sizes different types so
you can pick either ssd or hdd in different performance tiers of course the bigger
and the more performant the disk is the higher the price but it's still good that
you have that choice because you can make the choice to grab this slower disk for
your non-critical systems and development environments and lastly disk storage
allows customers to store their disk in unmanaged or managed form unmanaged means
each disk is stored as a file on a blob storage it's called unmanaged because it is
not managed by cloud provider customers are responsible for managing those blobs
and those drives and the storage accounts or you can use second more popular option
now which are managed disks that means microsoft is managing all the blob storage
all the files and all the services behind the scenes giving you a separate resource
called manage disk which not only hides the complexity of managing the disk
themselves but gives you some additional features which is very nice to have so
let's do a quick summary azure storage account is highly scalable and highly
durable group of services for unstructured and semi-structured data management so
if you need general purpose file storage that fits pretty much any scenario in
azure you can use azure blob storage if you need to take advantage of file shares
in the cloud for lift and shift scenarios or extension of your on-premise file
shares you can use azure file storage additionally if you're building scalable
asynchronous processing architectures you can use azure queue storage to deliver a
service for very small messages and process offloading if you need to have a small
simple yet scalable nosql database in azure to store your semi-structured data then
you can take advantage of azure table storage and lastly if you have virtual
machines and you need to provide a persistent drive for those virtual machines a
simple disk emulation service in the cloud then you take advantage of azure disk
storage as always go to my website to check some extra material study guides
practice tests and in this episode i also attached a lot of my videos covering
those storage services in more detail now that we have covered basics of azure
storage and how to store our unstructured and semi-structured data we can move to
databases so in the next episode we will get overview of azure database services
for now that's it if you like the video hit thumbs up leave a comment and subscribe
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