The second type of APIs to discuss are the Storage Services REST APIs which provide programmatic access to the four different services offered by Azure Storage: blobs, queues, tables, and files. These APIs can be accessed from the Internet, allowing them to be consumed from any kind of application that can send and receive HTTP requests and responses.

Every request to the Storage Service must be authenticated (except for reading public blobs); the services support a shared key authentication scheme with a required augmented signature string for enhanced security.

The service also supports the Shared Access Signature policy, which grants restricted access rights to each of its four services. These shared access signatures could be generated to clients who cannot be trusted on the storage account keys. The signature is created for particular resources, be it blob container, queue, table, or file for a specific period of time and defined permissions.

Azure Storage...