Welcome to the first lesson. This course walks through Azure Storage one topic a day, from the first storage account to monitoring, security and cost. Each lesson is short enough to read in ten minutes and ends with a small task.
What Azure Storage is
Azure Storage is the set of services Microsoft runs for data that does not fit in a database: files, objects, messages, tables and virtual machine disks. You pay for the space you use and the operations you make. Microsoft looks after the hardware, the copies of your data and the patching.
The storage account
Most of the services live inside a storage account. It is a container for your data and holds the settings that apply to everything inside it: the region, the redundancy, the network rules, the encryption and the access keys.
Every account has a name that is unique across all of Azure. It must be 3 to 24 characters, lower case letters and numbers only. The name becomes part of the web address for each service:
https://<name>.blob.core.windows.netfor blobshttps://<name>.file.core.windows.netfor file shareshttps://<name>.queue.core.windows.netfor queueshttps://<name>.table.core.windows.netfor tableshttps://<name>.dfs.core.windows.netfor Data Lake Storage
The main services
- Blob storage holds unstructured data such as backups, images, logs and installers. It is the most used service.
- Azure Files gives you file shares that Windows, Linux and macOS can mount over SMB or NFS. It can replace or extend a file server.
- Queue storage holds messages that one part of an application leaves for another to pick up.
- Table storage holds simple key and value records without a fixed structure.
- Managed disks are the disks for Azure virtual machines. They are a separate resource, not something you place inside a storage account.
Why it matters for an infrastructure engineer
Storage sits behind almost every Azure project. A file server migration uses Azure Files. A backup design uses blob storage. A virtual machine needs disks. A storage account that is set up badly is also one of the most common causes of data exposure and of surprise bills.
Today's task
Open the Azure portal, search for Storage accounts and select Create. Do not finish the wizard. Read each tab (Basics, Advanced, Networking, Data protection, Encryption) and note which settings you do not recognise yet. Those are the next lessons.