Book Image

Learning Microsoft Azure Storage

By : Mohamed Waly
Book Image

Learning Microsoft Azure Storage

By: Mohamed Waly

Overview of this book

Microsoft Azure Storage is the bedrock of Microsoft's core storage solution offering in Azure. No matter what solution you are building for the cloud, you'll find a compelling use for Azure Storage. This book will help you get up-to-speed quickly on Microsoft Azure Storage by teaching you how to use the different storage services. You will be able to leverage secure design patterns based on real-world scenarios and develop a strong storage foundation for Azure virtual machines. You will start this book with an introduction to Microsoft Azure storage and how it can be used to build large-scale, real-world applications using Azure storage services such as blob, table, queue, and file. This book will also teach you about the different types of Azure Storage. You will then find out the best practices for designing your Azure VM storage, whether it is Windows based or Linux based and how to migrate your storage in different scenarios. You will learn also how to plan and implement your SQL database solution on Azure, and how to build your SQL database in different service models (IaaS/PaaS). Moreover, you will also learn best practices for dealing with Azure Backup, the role of Azure Site Recovery, and the solutions they offer in different scenarios. Finally, you will use StorSimple to unlock the maximum value from all of your data, and some tools that will help you manage your storage on-and off-premise (Azure), such as AzCopy and Storage Explorer. Monitoring your storage in no laughing matter, so you will learn to monitor, diagnose and troubleshoot it.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

An introduction to Microsoft Azure Storage

Storage has always been one of the most important cornerstones of every system. You cannot imagine a virtual machine (VM), web application, or mobile application running without any sort of dependency on storage, and that is what we will cover throughout this book, but from the perspective of the cloud generally, and Azure specifically.

Microsoft Azure Storage is the bedrock of Microsoft's core storage solution offering in Azure. No matter what solution you are building for the cloud, you'll find a compelling use for Azure Storage.

Microsoft Azure Storage is not just a traditional storage system; it's scalable and can store up to hundreds of terabytes of data, meaning that it fits almost every scenario you can ever imagine in many fields, such as IT, science, medical fields, and so on.

At the time of writing, Microsoft Azure is generally available in 36 regions, with plans announced for six additional regions, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 1.1: Azure regions

This global presence means you can host your storage in the nearest region and access it from anywhere in the world. Considering that Microsoft continues to build new data centers in new regions, the latency between you and your services in Azure will decrease.

You can find out the nearest region to you with the lowest latency via the following website http://www.azurespeed.com/. Azure services are available in 140 countries around the globe and supports 17 languages and 24 currencies.