Microsoft Azure Storage and Database Part 1 – Overview

Hello Friends,

First of all, Thank You so much for your likes, comments, suggestions and questions on our last series on Learn Basics Of Azure Networking In 60 Hours and Learn Basic Of Azure Active Directory And Azure Identity And Access Management. Now I am starting with a new series on Microsoft Azure Storage and Database. After Azure Networking and  Azure Identity And Access Management, Microsoft Azure Storage and Database is considered as the third Pillar of Microsoft Azure. We will try to cover the basic concept of most of the important features and services related to this service provided by Microsoft Azure. Please let me know if I missed any thing important or if you have any suggestions by commenting this article.

Microsoft Azure Storage and Database:

Storage services are considered as base services of cloud platform. We can achieve many advantages of using Azure Storage like easily scalable, highly available, excellent durable etc. In up-coming article we will discuss all types of services provided by Azure Storage.

Database services are services that designed in such a way to support scaling, performance, and availability on demands. SQL Database allow to create relational, table based database where we can perform CRUD operation on data. Cosmos DB allows to create multiple kinds of No-SQL databases- document, key value, column and  graph that are highly elastic, distributed and scalable.

Followings are the services provided by azure to manage business data, so that it could be easily scalable, highly available, excellent durable etc. We will go through in detail, for each of the following services in our upcoming articles.

Azure Storage Services :

• Blob Storage Service : Azure Blob Storage is a scalable cloud storage designed to store huge amounts of unstructured data. Azure Blob is a flat-namespace system and is the go-to-storage for storing massive amounts of unstructured data. To learn more see this.
• File Storage Service: Azure Files Storage is a shared storage service that lets us to access files via the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol and and NFS protocols. This service can mount file shares on Windows, Linux or Mac machines in the Azure cloud. You can also cache file shares in on-premises Windows Servers using the Azure File Sync agent.
• Queue Storage Service: Azure Queue Storage is a service for storing large numbers of messages. We can access messages from anywhere in the world via authenticated calls using HTTP or HTTPS.
• Disk Storage Service : Azure Disk Storage offers high-performance, highly durable block storage for our mission- and business-critical applications. It is designed to be used with Azure Virtual Machines.
• Data Lake Storage Service : Azure Data Lake Storage includes all the capabilities required to make it easy for developers, data scientists and analysts to store data of any size, shape and speed, and do all types of processing and analytics on any platforms and with any languages. It removes the complexities of ingesting and storing all of our data while making it faster to get up and running with batch, streaming and interactive analytics.
• Archive Storage Service : Azure Archive Storage provides highly available secure, durable and low-cost cloud storage for rarely accessed data with flexible latency requirements. Store terabytes of data in the cloud with very low charge a month and repurpose our storage infrastructure for other critical business objectives.
• Avere vFXT for Azure Storage Service : Avere vFXT for Azure is a filesystem caching solution for data-intensive high-performance computing (HPC) tasks. It allow to take advantage of cloud computing’s scalability to make our data accessible when and where it’s needed – even for data that’s stored in our own on-premises hardware.

Azure Database Service :

• SQL Database Service: Azure SQL Database is the intelligent, scalable, relational database service built for the cloud. It is always up to date, with AI-powered and automated features that optimize performance and durability for you. Server less compute and Hyperscale storage options automatically scale resources on demand.
• CosmosDB Service : Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed NoSQL database service for modern app development. Get guaranteed single-digit millisecond response times and 99.999-percent availability, backed by SLAs, automatic and instant scalability and open-source APIs for MongoDB and Cassandra. Enjoy fast writes and reads anywhere in the world with turnkey multi-master global distribution.

Other Important Tools And Services:

• Azure Data Factory : Data Factory, is a cloud data integration service, to compose data storage, movement, and processing services into automated data pipelines. 
• Storage Explorer : Azure Storage Explorer is an application which helps us to easily access the Azure storage account through any device on any platform, be it Windows, MacOS, or Linux. You can easily connect to your subscription and manipulate your tables, blobs, queues, and files. Create, delete, view and edit resources in Azure Storage, Azure Cosmos DB, and Data Lake Storage.
• Azure File Sync agent : The Azure File Sync agent enables data on a Windows Server to be synchronized with an Azure File share. 

Next Article : Part 2 – Azure Storage Account

With the above information, I am concluding this article. I hope this is informative to you. As discussed, I am going to explore the Azure Storage and Database in a detail level in my up-coming articles. Please let me know if I missed anything important or if my understanding is not up to the mark.

Keep reading, share your thoughts, experiences. Feel free to contact us to discuss more.

If you have any suggestion / feedback / doubt, you are most welcome. Stay tuned on Knowledge-Junction, will come up with more such articles.

Thanks for reading 🙂 .