Azure Storage Account

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Azure Storage is Microsoft’s storage solution in the cloud which can be scaled, durable and highly available. Azure Storage includes the following data services:

  • Azure Blobs: A massively scalable object store for text and binary data.
  • Azure Files: Managed file shares for cloud or on-premises deployments.
  • Azure Queues: A messaging store for reliable messaging between application components.
  • Azure Tables: A NoSQL store for schemaless storage of structured data.

Account Types

Azure has several storage account types, each with its own features and pricing. The types of storage accounts are:

  • General-purpose v2 accounts: Basic storage account type for blobs, files, queues, and tables. Recommended for most scenarios using Azure Storage.
  • General-purpose v1 accounts: Legacy account type for blobs, files, queues, and tables.
  • Block blob storage accounts: Blob-only storage accounts with premium performance characteristics.

Replication

Storage accounts can be replicated either within a data centre, between local datacentre or to another geographical location. Replication options for a storage account include:

  • Locally-redundant storage (LRS): A simple, low-cost replication strategy. Data is replicated within a single storage scale unit (Within a datacentre).
  • Zone-redundant storage (ZRS): Replication for high availability and durability. Data is replicated synchronously across three availability zones (Between local datacentre).
  • Geo-redundant storage (GRS): Cross-regional replication to protect against region-wide unavailability (To another geographical location).
  • Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS): Cross-regional replication with read access to the replica.

Creating a Storage account – Portal

  1. Log into the Azure portal
  2. Click Create a resource and search for Storage account
  3. On the Create Storage Account blade fill out the required information
    – Resource Group
    – Storage account name  (Must be  3 and 24 characters in length, and can include numbers and lowercase letters only.)
    – Location
    – Account type
    – Replication
    – Access tier
  4. Click next to go to Advanced to add security as well as tags.
  5. Click on Create

Creating a Storage account – PowerShell

  1. Connect via PowerShell  with  Connect-AzAccount
  2. Store the Resource Group, Location and Account name as a variable
    $resourceGroup = "RG1"
    $location = "westus"
    $accountname = "alastairhillstorage02"
  3. Use  New-AzStorageAccount to create the storage account
    New-AzStorageAccount -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup `
    -Name $accountname `
    -Location $location `
    -SkuName Standard_RAGRS `
    -Kind StorageV2

The screenshot below is of the PowerShell inputs and the resulting output