Why might you use Azure File Storage? What is this about?

Why might you use Azure File Storage? To share files that are stored on-premises with users located at other sites. To enable users at different sites to share files. 0 To store large binary data files containing images or other unstructured data. 4. You are building a system that monitors the temperature throughout a set of office blocks, and sets the air conditioning in each room in each block to maintain a pleasant ambient temperature.

Your system has to manage the air conditioning in several thousand buildings spread across the country/region, and each building typically contains at least 100 air- conditioned rooms. What type of NoSQL data store is most appropriate for capturing the temperature data to enable it to be processed quickly? O Send the data to an Azure Cosmos DB database and use Azure Functions to process the data. Store the data in a file stored in a share created using Azure File Storage. O Write the temperatures to a blob in Azure Blob storage.

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Why might you use Azure File Storage?

Azure file storage mainly can be used if we want to have a shared drive between two servers or across users. In that case, we will go for Azure file storage. In the Azure file storage structure, the first thing we need to have is an Azure storage account. Azure file storage is offered under the umbrella of the Azure storage account. And once we have created an Azure storage account, we’ll create a file share.

We can create an unlimited number of file shares within a storage account. Once we create a file share, then we can create directories, just like folders, and then we can upload files into it. Once we create a file share, we can mount that on any virtual machine, whether it is in Azure or outside.

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Some of the concepts related to Azure file storage:

Storage Account: All access to Azure Storage service is done through a storage account. We need to keep in mind scalability and performance targets when we might have Azure fie storage, blob storage, tables, and queues. All of them might be sharing the same performance targets under the storage account, so the same limitations of storage account will be shared-by across all services.
Share: A file storage Share is an SMB file share in Azure. The directories and files must be created in a parent’s Share, so we can’t create a directory directly in a storage account. We need file storage share, first created, and then we can create directories to upload. An account may contain an unlimited number of shares, and a Share can store an unlimited number of files, up to 5 TB total capacity of the file share. But, in case we need more than the full capacity, then we can create another file share.
Directory: It is an optional hierarchy of directories.
File: A file in the share. A file may be up to 1 TB in size.
URL format: For a request to an Azure file share made with the file REST protocol

What Is Azure Storage?

Azure Storage is a cloud storage solution delivered by Microsoft that enables you to store and access data in the cloud. It offers highly available, massively scalable storage as five different storage services: file, blob, queue, table, and disk.

Data storage objects are accessed using REST APIs or SDKs which are available in several programming languages, including .NET, Java, and Python. Developers can also access Azure Storage using scripts created with Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell or via the Azure Portal or Azure Storage Explorer.

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How Azure SaaS Works

Azure SaaS solutions are hosted by Microsoft Azure and made available to customers through a web browser using a pay-as-you-go (PaYG) payment model. Users don’t need to install or maintain the software on their own devices.

To use Azure SaaS, begin by setting up an Azure account, either by purchasing a subscription or signing up for a free trial. Once your account is ready, you can choose, configure, and deploy your services to the Azure cloud. You can also monitor your storage usage from your account. Azure’s PaYG model means that you only pay for services as you use them, enabling you to scale up or down as demand requires.

Benefits of Azure Storage

Azure Storage offers several beneficial features and capabilities for organizations, including:

Scalability

Azure Storage is massively scalable and able to meet today’s modern applications’ performance and storage needs. Organizations can quickly and easily adapt to changing business requirements and workloads by scaling storage capacity up or down as demand changes.

Predictable Costs

Because storage is paid on a PaYG basis, you only pay for the resources you use. With predictable costs, you can budget more effectively than if you’re purchasing and maintaining your own storage infrastructure. Further, with Azure Storage SaaS, you don’t have to worry about the costs associated with operating a data center and training IT personnel to maintain it.

Security

Like all major managed service providers, Azure Storage implements security controls and monitoring mechanisms for detecting threats. Azure Storage also adheres to the relevant compliance regulations for data privacy and safety. All the data in your Azure Storage account is encrypted, and you have fine-grained control over who has access to your data.

Reliability and Availability

Azure Storage uses redundancy and replication to ensure that the service is reliable and highly available. Redundancy ensures that your data remains available in the event of a hardware failure. Data is replicated to data centers across geographical regions to support business continuity and disaster recovery in an emergency.

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Flexibility

Azure Storage offers a range of different storage options to meet the specific needs and requirements of your organization. Options include file storage for easy storage and access to data in any on-premises or virtual environment; block storage for fast, low-latency access; and scalable, highly durable object storage for backing up or archiving large volumes of data that isn’t accessed frequently.

5 Primary Azure Storage Types

Azure Storage offers the following five primary types of storage that can be used individually or combined to meet your different storage needs:

File: Enables you to set up fully managed cloud file storage for sharing files with multiple users. File shares can be mounted from on-premises or cloud deployments on Windows, Linux, and macOS and accessed from anywhere via the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, Network File System (NFS) protocol, and the Azure Files REST API.
Blob: Is object storage used to store and access large volumes of unstructured data, such as images and videos. Users can access blob storage via the Azure Storage REST API, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, or storage client libraries.
Queue: Stores and retrieves messages that need to be processed asynchronously. Each queue can hold millions of messages with each message up to 64K in size.
Table: Is a NoSQL, key/attribute store with a schema-less design that you can use to store large amounts of structured, non-relational data in the cloud.
Disks: Allows you to store and process data from an attached virtual hard disk (VHD). It is referred to as “managed” because it is an abstraction of Azure Storage accounts, blob containers, and page blobs.

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