Blob Storage, Page blob, Block Blob

Azure Blob Storage

• Locally redundant, Geo Redundant, Zone Redundant, Read Only Geo Redundant
• Tiers – Cool Tier 30 days; Archive – 180 days

Azure Blob vs Azure StorSimple

• StorSimple is a hybrid storage solution
• Only StorSimple is SMB compliants

Page Blob (8 TB) vs Block Blob (4.7 TB)

• Random Read Write – Page Blob. Random R/W Access
• Storage of large petabytes – Block Blob. Also – Sequential Access. Good for storing streaming data

• Block blobs store text and binary data, up to about 4.7 TB. Block blobs are made up of blocks of data that can be managed individually. Sequential Access
• Append blobs are made up of blocks like block blobs, but are optimized for append operations. Append blobs are ideal for scenarios such as logging data from virtual machines.
• Page blobs store random access files up to 8 TB in size. Page blobs store virtual hard drive (VHD) files and serve as disks for Azure virtual machines. For more information about page blobs, see Overview of Azure page blobs

Azure Blob Storage and CDN

• Enable CDN on the Azure Blob Storage account
• Configure a CNAME DNS record for the CDN domain

Azure Premium Storage (low latency, high performance) and Standard Storage – both durable storage

Azure Block blobs

let you upload large blobs efficiently. Block blobs are comprised of blocks, each of which is identified by a block ID. You create or modify a block blob by writing a set of blocks and committing them by their block IDs. Each block can be a different size, up to a maximum of 100 MB (4 MB for requests using REST versions before 2016-05-31), and a block blob can include up to 50,000 blocks. The maximum size of a block blob is therefore slightly more than 4.75 TB (100 MB X 50,000 blocks). For REST versions before 2016-05-31, the maximum size of a block blob is a little more than 195 GB (4 MB X 50,000 blocks). If you are writing a block blob that is no more than 256 MB (64 MB for requests using REST versions before 2016-05-31) in size, you can upload it in its entirety with a single write operation; see Put Blob.

Azure Page Blobs – Up to 8 TB – and can be shared between VMs

Page blobs are a collection of 512-byte pages optimized for random read and write operations. To create a page blob, you initialize the page blob and specify the maximum size the page blob will grow. To add or update the contents of a page blob, you write a page or pages by specifying an offset and a range that align to 512-byte page boundaries. A write to a page blob can overwrite just one page, some pages, or up to 4 MB of the page blob. Writes to page blobs happen in-place and are immediately committed to the blob. The maximum size for a page blob is 8 TB.

Azure virtual machine disks are backed by page blobs.

Azure offers two types of durable disk storage: premium and standard.

Azure Append Blobs

An append blob is comprised of blocks and is optimized for append operations. When you modify an append blob, blocks are added to the end of the blob only, via the Append Block operation. Updating or deleting of existing blocks is not supported. Unlike a block blob, an append blob does not expose its block IDs.

Each block in an append blob can be a different size, up to a maximum of 4 MB, and an append blob can include up to 50,000 blocks. The maximum size of an append blob is therefore slightly more than 195 GB (4 MB X 50,000 blocks).