Mike: Welcome folks, now that we've level set
on storage accounts in general,
let's start looking at specific types that we can use.
So let's dive into blob storage.
Blob storage is unstructured object storage
in Azure simply put.
It's highly scalable and durable,
it's accessed via HTTP and or HTTPS
and as you can imagine, adding the S is always preferred.
In blob storage types,
there are three to make note of:
Block blobs, which are storage of discrete objects,
append blobs, which are optimized for appended operations
as in adding onto, and page blobs, which are used
for frequent read-write operations.
Blob storage inherits all of the tier
and performance types of storage accounts.
You have hot, cool, cold and archive tiers.
You also have standard and premium performance.
In this, we have general purpose V2
and block blob storage accounts.
We have high throughput and IOPS with your premium tier.
So lots of the same types of components that are in general
with storage accounts are also here in blob storage.
Blob storage security also inherits the ability
for authentication and authorization with access keys
and share access signatures.
We also have encryption with encryption at rest
and encryption in transit, and there's secure transfer
that is required for all API interactions.
Something to remember when it comes to using APIs
to interact with blob storage
is that secure transfer is required.
Blob storage reliability and disaster recovery.
As with storage accounts, we have local,
zone, geo, RA-geo.
We also have RA-ZGRS.
So again, there's lots of combinations
that can be done here.
There's asynchronous replication to a secondary region
that can also occur.
So all of these have to be considered
when it comes to the reliability
and disaster recovery that you're going to have
when it comes to your blob storage.
There are three key pieces of information
when it comes to blob lifecycle management.
The first is to understand what it is.
It is automating processes like blob tiering and deletion.
The second is the major advantage of reduced cost
that lifecycle management provides.
Why, because we're not paying for data
that we no longer need.
The third is that when defining rules for your processes,
basing them on blog prophecies,
tags or index tags, those are the common best practices.
So we're going to want to set up some prefaces
or multiple types of prefix tags
or other index tags,
and by using those, we can implement rules based on them,
and that makes the rules both specific and more efficient.
Data protection strategies.
Soft delete is a feature that's great for accidental
or malicious deletion.
Versioning is good for maintaining previous versions
that you may need to refer to later.
Immutable storage for WORM compliance.
Immutable storage for Azure blob storage enables users
to store business critical data in a WORM
or write once, read many state.
While in a WORM state, data cannot be modified
or deleted for a user-specified interval.
So by configuring immutability policies for blob data,
you can protect your data from overwrites and deletes.
And finally, we have point in time restore for block blobs.
Very handy if we know
that a specific event occurred at a specific time,
we can restore to the closest point
before that event occurred.
Let's look at a scenario.
A customer needs to store application backups and logs.
Point in time restore is required for up to 30 days,
and backups are rarely accessed,
but must be kept for seven years.
This is common in things like regulatory
or industry compliance types of scenarios.
So a solution could be to use blob versioning
and soft elite for point in time restore.
We would enable GRS for disaster recovery,
ensuring that it's available in multiple geographic regions,
and we can use lifecycle management
to transition backups to an archive tier after 30 days.
And then on top of that,
we would configure immutable blob policies
for a seven year retention
so that that archive tier cannot be written over
if the data in it is not yet seven years old.
So this is just taking the different components
of qualities you can implement in your blob storage,
and here's a scenario where you have to
look at what the customer requirements are
and then come up with a storage solution
that meets those requirements.
I hope this has helped,
I hope it has been informative,
and I hope to see you in the next lesson.