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Hope you all are doing good !!! 🙂 .

In our previous articles we have discussed How To Configure Azure File Sync. With the previous articles, we are going to press the pause button to our journey with Blob and File storage. We will see those topics later if there is any new feature added to those services. Today in this article we will talk about the differences between Blob Storage and File Storage.

Tool Installation Articles :

1. Configure Azure Command Line Interface ( Azure CLI) On Windows
2. Configure PowerShell For Microsoft Azure Az Module On Windows

Previous Azure Series :

1. Learn Basics Of Azure Networking In 60 Hours
2. Learn Basic Of Azure Active Directory And Azure Identity And Access Management
3. Azure DevOps – Learn at one place

If you have missed our previous articles on Azure Storage and Database Series, please check it in following links.

Part 1 – Overview Of Azure Storage and Database

Part 2 – Azure Storage Account

Part 3 – Azure Blob Storage

Part 4 – Work With Azure Blob Storage

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Part 21 – Azure File Service – Create And Manage File Share Snapshots Using PowerShell

Part 22 – Azure File Service – Configure Azure File Share Back Up Using PowerShell

Part 23 – Azure File Service – Restore Azure Files From Back Up Using PowerShell

Part 24 – Azure File Service – Storage Sync Service

Part 25 – Azure File Service – Storage Sync Service – Configure Azure File Sync – 1

Part 26 – Azure File Service – Storage Sync Service – Configure Azure File Sync – 2

Next Article : Part 28 – Azure Queue Storage – Overview

Azure Storage

Azure Storage is a Microsoft-managed cloud service that provides storage that is highly available, secure, durable, scalable and redundant. Within Azure there are two types of storage accounts, four types of storage, four levels of data redundancy and three tiers for storing files.

Microsoft offers several options to store data on the cloud. Each option has its unique purpose for serving different business needs. One of the significant capabilities that Microsoft Azure provides is the agility to migrate to different storage options if required.

There are following options available in the Azure Storage Account for storing user data.

• Blob Storage
• File Storage
• Table Storage
• Queue Storage
• Disk

Basic Different Between Azure File Storage And Azure Blob Storage

Azure Files:

Azure Files offer fully managed File shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry-standard SMB. Azure File shares can be mounted concurrently by cloud or on-premises deployments of Windows, Linux, and macOS. It can be cached on Windows servers with Azure File Sync for faster access. Provides a SMB 3.0 interface in addition to the REST interface to provide access to files. The SMB interface enables applications running in the cloud to use native file system APIs to read and write from files. It is more costly and Azure File Storage may be mounted as an SMB volume

A file share is ideal for:

• Lifting & shifting applications to the cloud which already use native file system APIs to share data between pieces of the applications
• Storing development and debugging tools that need to be accessed from many cloud instances
• Applications that want REST access to data from anywhere and SMB access to data from within the region the storage account is located in

Azure Blobs :

 Azure Blob Storage is an object storage solution for the cloud. Blob Storage allows you to store a massive amount of unstructured data. The unstructured data need not be of the specific data model. Provides a REST interface for massively scale out object storage. It is more costly and Azure File Storage may be mounted as an SMB volume

Blob storage is ideal for:

• Serving images or documents directly to a browser.
• Storing files for distributed access.
• Streaming video and audio.
• Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.
• Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service.

Scalability

It is significant to know the quota and limits of Azure Storage to choose the right option. The highest level of representation for capacity in Azure Blob Storage is Containers, whereas for Files is Shares.

Limitations To Blob Storage

Resource	Type of Blob	Limit
Maximum size of single blob container		5 PB
Maximum number of blocks	Block / Append	50,000
Maximum block size	Block	100 MB
Maximum total block size	Append	4 MiB
Maximum total blob size	Block	Approx. 4.75 TB
Maximum total blob size	Append	Approximately 195 GB
Maximum total blob size	Page	8 TB
Maximum stored access policies per container	All	5
Target request rate for blob	All	500/second
Target throughput for blob	Page	60 MB/s
Target throughput for blob	Block	Depends on storage account ingress/egress limits

Limitations File Shares

Resource	Standard file shares	Premium file shares
Minimum share size	N/A	100 GB
Maximum share size	5 TB by default, can be increased up to 100TB	100 TB
Maximum file size	1 TB	4 TB
Maximum IOPS	1,000 IOPS*	100,000 IOPS
Maximum stored access policies**	5	5
Target throughput**	60 MB/sec**	Ingress 4,136 MB/sEgress 6,204 MB/s
Maximum number of share snapshots	200	200
Maximum directory/file name length (chars)	2,048	2,048
Maximum hard links	N/A	178

Security

Disaster Recovery

Azure Blob storage	Azure File Storage
Support Soft Delete	Support Soft Delete
Use Copy Blob to asynchronously copy your Blob to destination Storage Account.	Use Copy File to asynchronously copy File share to destination Storage Account.
Can be restored from backup	Can be restored from backup

Pricing

Pricing described here is based on the Microsoft documentation as per current date.

Data Storage Prices

Following are the prices for storing data in Azure File and Blob Storage

Blob Storage	PREMIUM	HOT	COOL	ARCHIVE
First 50 terabyte (TB) / month	$0.18 per GB	$0.022 per GB	$0.01 per GB	$0.00099 per GB
Next 450 TB / Month	$0.18 per GB	$0.0212 per GB	$0.01 per GB	$0.00099 per GB
Over 500 TB / Month	$0.18 per GB	$0.0203 per GB	$0.01 per GB	$0.00099 per GB

File Storage	STANDARD
GB/month	$0.06 per used GB
Snapshots GB/month	$0.06 per used GB

Operations and Data Transfer prices

Following are the prices for Operations and Data Transfering in Azure File and Blob Storage

Blob Storage	PREMIUM	HOT	COOL	ARCHIVE
Write operations (per 10,000)1	$0.021	$0.05	$0.10	$0.11
List and Create Container Operations (per 10,000)2	$0.06	$0.05	$0.05	$0.05
Read operations (per 10,000)3 Archive High Priority Read (per 10,000)5	$0.0017	$0.004	$0.01	$5.50 $30
All other Operations (per 10,000), except Delete, which is free	$0.0017	$0.004	$0.004	$0.004
Data Retrieval (per GB)4 Archive High Priority Retrieval (per GB)5	Free	Free	$0.01	$0.022 $0.06
Data Write (per GB)4	Free	Free	$0.0025	Free

File Storage	STANDARD
Put, Create Container Operations (per 10,000)	$0.015
List Operations (per 10,000)	$0.015
All other operations except Delete, which is free (per 10,000)	$0.0015
Geo-Replication Data Transfer (per GiB)	N/A

There are individual aspects to be considered before concluding the best option between Azure Blob Storage and Files. Taking the common functionalities into consideration, I would prefer Azure Blob Storage rather than Files if there is not special requirement.

With the above information, I am concluding this article. I hope this is informative to you. 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.

Next Article : Part 28 – Azure Queue Storage – Overview

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 🙂 .