As a matter of fact, Azure Storage, including blobs, tables and queues, architecture has three fundamental layers:
The Frontend (FE) layer that takes requests, authenticates and authorizes them, and then routes them to the appropriate partition server. The FE layer keeps a partition map, which allows it to know where this data is stored and in what partition.
The Partition layer consists of partition servers and manages the partitioning of objects based on their PartitionKey. In tables, entities belong to partitions that are stored on partition servers; a partition cannot be split and will always be served by the same server. The PL automatically load balances traffic on partitions, such that, if a partition server is serving two hot partitions, it will move one of them into a different lower traffic partition server.
The Distributed File System (DFS) layer is responsible for storing the physical data on disks, and for replicating and distributing the data across...