Azure Blob Storage Performance Tiers

Depending on the performance requirements to access data (low latency), Azure provides two tiers that can be selected while creating a storage account:

• Standard: This is recommended for general use cases where premium performance is not so much of a requirement. The type of storage account provided in this tier is called a General Purpose v2 account and can be used for blobs, file shares, queues, or tables.
• Premium: Premium Tier only stores Blob data. In cases of intense need to access data, high transactions, or low latency, this premium performance tier can be selected. Here the choice of storage account is narrowed even more, where one can choose between the type of blob data that one will need premium performance for. E.g.:
• Block Blobs: Premium storage and performance for block blobs i.e. storing text and binary data.
• Append Blobs: Premium storage and performance for block blobs that require append operations.
• Page Blobs: Premium storage and performance for page blobs only.

Importance of Blob-URL in Azure for accessing uploaded files.

Every blob file uploaded is given a unique URL (demonstrated below). The BLOB URLs follow the fixed pattern, in that the URLs are made up of the below pattern:

<StorageAccountName>.blob.core.windows.net/<ContainerName>/<FileNameWithExtension>

Eg: demostorage.blob.core.windows.net/test/toronto-skyline-from-park.jpg

Blob URLs are very useful to perform various operations on the uploaded file. For example, if an image file needs to be rendered in HTML, the URL can be used as the image source.

Using Blob URLs one can:

• retrieve a specific version of a Blob object eg: https://demostorage.blob.core.windows.net/test/toronto-skyline-from-park.jpg?versionId=2024-02-16T06:27:39.1608774Z
• get the metadata about the object (Blob properties)
• set or modify metadata about the object
• delete/undelete the Blob object
• copy the Blob Object
• append data to an existing Blob Object
• access a Blob Object securely using SAS Tokens (the generated SAS tokens are appended to the Blob URL and provided by Azure)

Azure Blob Storage is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering by Microsoft’s cloud solution Azure, to store unrestricted amounts of data objects. Here, object refers to any unstructured data such as documents (text, log files that are updated), binary data, and virtual hard drives. Blob storage resources are also used as storage during backup and restore operations in Azure. In the cloud computing world, the features of a cloud service depend highly on its durability, scalability, accessibility, and security.

• Durability and Redundancy: Azure Blob Storage leverages Azure’s local and geo-redundancy capabilities to protect your data against local hardware failures or region failures. This makes Azure’s storage service highly redundant and durable. Azure Blob storage accounts can also be configured to be connected using a private endpoint or publicly from selected virtual networks or IP addresses.
• Security: Data stored in Azure Blob Storage is encrypted by default using Microsoft’s encryption keys, and blob files are not publicly accessible by default, but this is configurable. Also, Azure provides granular access control over the containers and objects within the storage account. Versioning for blobs, point-in-time restore for containers, and retaining deleted blobs are other data protection features offered.
• Access: Data in Azure Blob Storage can be accessed via REST APIs too. Many languages, like .NET, Java, Node.js, Python, Go etc. have Azure-provided client libraries that can be used to develop applications that access data from storage accounts programmatically. Azure Portal and Azure CLI are other tools that can be used.