This blog post will go through some quick tips including Q/A and related blog posts on the topics that we covered in the Azure Admin Day 6 Live Session which will help you gain a better understanding and make it easier for you to
The previous week, In Day 5 session we got an overview of Module 6: Azure Virtual Machines where we have covered topics like Azure VMs, SLA for Virtual Machines, VM Extensions, VM Scale Sets, Azure Snapshot.
In this blog, I am going to share some quick tips including Q/A and useful links from Day 6 of Azure Admin covering Module 7: Azure Storage where we have covered topics like Azure Storage, Azure Storage Account Types, Azure Core Storage Services, Azure Table Storage, Azure Storage Blob, Blob Storage Categories, Blob Storage Access Tiers, Azure Queue Storage, Azure File Storage, Managed and Unmanaged Disks in Azure, Azure Storage Redundancy, Storage Access Keys, Azure Private Link Endpoint, Azure Shared Access Signatures.
Azure Storage
The Azure storage account is durable, highly available, and scalable. By using Azure storage account services, we don’t need to worry about space because it will be scaled upon our demand. The Azure storage account is a container that groups a set of Azure storage services together. Only data services from Azure storage can be included in a storage account.
Storage account in Azure is a method of creating a storage service for storing data in it. It contains all the all azure storage objects decided to single resource group. It contains Blob, queue, tables, and files with disk images. It uniquely provides namespace and service access to functions of storage.
Within Azure, there are two types of storage accounts, four types of storage, four levels of data redundancy, and three tiers for storing files. We will explore each one of these options in detail to help you understand which offer meets your big data storage needs.
➝Read more about Azure Storage.
Q1. What is the maximum capacity for storage accounts in Azure?
Ans. Each Azure subscription can have up to 200 storage accounts, each with up to 500 TiB (roughly 550 TB) of space. There are no limits to the number of blobs or files that you can put in a storage account.
Azure Storage Account Types
An Azure storage account is an access point to all the elements that compose the Azure storage realm. Once the user creates the storage account, they can select the level of resilience needed and Azure will take care of the rest. A single storage account can store up to 500TB of data and like any other Azure service, users can take advantage of the pay-per-use pricing model.
There are two different storage account types. With the “standard” storage account, users get access to Blob Storage, Table Storage, Queue Storage, and File Storage. The alternative, “premium” account, is the most recent storage option which provides users with data storage on SSD drives for better I/O performance; this option supports only page blobs.
➝Read more about the Azure Storage Accounts.
Q2. What is the maximum size of the Azure blob storage container?
Ans: Azure Blob storage provides massively scalable object storage for workloads including application data, HPC, backup, and high-scale workloads. Microsoft has increased the maximum size of a single blob from 5 TB to 200 TB, now available in preview.
Q3. Where are activity logs stored?
Ans. Activity log data in a Log Analytics workspace is stored in a table called AzureActivity that you can retrieve with a log query in Log Analytics. The structure of this table varies depending on the category of the log entry.
Azure Core Storage Services
There are several advantages to using Azure storage irrespective of type. Azure storage is easily scalable, extremely flexible, and relatively low in cost depending on the options you choose.
The Azure Storage platform includes the following data services:
- Table – A NoSQL store for schemaless storage of structured data.
- Blob – A massively scalable object store for text and binary data.
- Queue – An asynchronous message queueing between application components.
- Files – Managed file shares for cloud or on-premises deployments.
➝Read more about the Azure Core Storage Services.
Azure Table Storage
Azure Table Storage is a scalable, NoSQL, key-value data storage system that can be used to store large amounts of data in the cloud. This storage offering has a schemaless design, and each table has rows that are composed of key-value pairs. You can use Table storage to store and query huge sets of structured, non-relational data, and your tables will scale as demand increases.
Azure Blob Storage
Blob Storage is Microsoft Azure’s service for storing binary large objects or blobs which are typically composed of unstructured data such as text, images, and videos, along with their metadata. Blobs are stored in directory-like structures called “containers.”
Binary Large Object is the storage arena for text, audio, images, and video. Every blob resides inside a container. Blob storage act as the persistent store, where the data is stored for a long time. Three options include Private, Public Container, and Public Blob.
➝Read more about Azure Blob Storage
Q4. What is a container in Azure storage?
Ans. A container organizes a set of blobs, similar to a directory in a file system. A storage account can include an unlimited number of containers, and a container can store an unlimited number of blobs. The container name must be lowercase.
Blob Storage Categories
Although blob allows for storage of large binary objects in Azure, these are optimized for three different storage scenarios:
- Block blobs: These are blobs that are intended to store discrete objects such as images, log files, and more. In this storage option, individual blocks with unique IDs are created. It is mainly used for uploading big-size data.
- Page blobs: These are optimized for random read and write operations and can grow up to 8TB in size. Within the page blob category, Azure offers two types of storage: standard and premium. The latter is the most ideal for virtual machine (VM) storage disks (including the operating system disk). Data of the virtual machines are stored as virtual documents and files on the page blob. For the virtual machine, it acts as disks.
- Append Blobs: Append blobs are used to append data. Basically, this means that each time you make changes to the blob, the data will be appended at the end of the blob. Data cannot be changed or deleted, only appended. The Append Blob is specifically customized to increase efficiency. It can also help in logging the data directly from the VMs.
Azure Blob Access Tiers
To begin with, Azure storage provides various access tiers. Further, these allow you to store blob object data in the most cost-effective method. Furthermore, the available access tiers involve the following:
Hot access tier – The hot access tier offers higher storage costs than the other two- cool and archive tiers. Also, they are at the lowest access costs.
Cool access tier – The cool access tier comes with lower storage costs and higher access costs in comparison to hot storage. Not to mention, this tier is designed for data that will remain in the cool tier for a minimum of 30 days.
Archive Access tier – The Archive access tier offers the lowest storage cost. However, it has higher data retrieval costs compared to the hot and cool tiers. Not to mention, data must remain in the archive tier for at least 180 days or be subject to an early deletion charge. While a blob is in archive storage, the blob data is offline and can’t be read, overwritten, or modified. To read or download a blob in the archive, you should first rehydrate it to an online tier.
Q5. Is the hot tier readily available?
Ans. The Storage or the blob files as Hot means we want these files readily accessible. The Data stored in these types of storage are always readily available.
Q6. What is Azure Blob rehydration?
Ans. Once the Access Tier is moved to the Archive tier, your Blob will be inaccessible. Archive storage is offline. At this time if you want to access the blob you will get a “This operation is not permitted on an archived blob” error. To access your archive data back, you need to rehydrate back your storage tier to either Hot or Cool. This process is called Blob Rehydration. The rehydration process may take several hrs. ( up to 15 hrs. to complete) .
When the rehydration is in progress, the blob will be still inaccessible. You can start the rehydration process by just updating the tier for the blobs, and check the status of the rehydration. Once the rehydration is complete, you can start access the data. This type of access tier ideal Long-term backup, and archival datasets where frequent data access is not required. The archive tier has the lowest storage cost and highest access cost.
Azure Queue Storage
Queues have been around for a long time — their simple FIFO (first in, first out) architecture makes queues a versatile solution for storing messages that do not need to be in a certain order. In simple terms, Azure Queue Storage is a service that allows users to store high volumes of messages, process them asynchronously, and consume them when needed while keeping costs down by leveraging a pay-per-use pricing model.
➝Read more about Azure Queue Storage
Azure File Storage
Azure file storage makes it easy to move applications that depend on regular file shares to the cloud. Microsoft Azure File Service is is a cloud storage service that allows Windows Server administrators to access Server-Message-Block-Protocol (SMB) shares in the Azure cloud by setting up file shares in the Azure management console. Azure File Service can be a shared resource so test machines and development have access to one file share when installing tools, applications, and utilities.
Managed Disk and Unmanaged Disks in Azure
Azure-managed disks are block-level storage volumes that are managed by Azure and used with Azure Virtual Machines. Managed disks are like a physical disk in an on-premises server but, virtualized. Managed disks are designed for 99.999% availability. Managed disks achieve this by providing you with three replicas of your data, allowing for high durability.
There are four disk types of Azure managed disks: Azure ultra disks, premium SSD, standard SSD, and standard HDD. You can switch between premium SSD, standard SSD, and standard HDD based on your performance needs.
➝Read more about Managed Disks
Microsoft Azure unmanaged disk is a Microsoft-managed cloud service that provides storage that is highly available, secure, durable, scalable, and redundant. … In an unmanaged disk, you manage the storage accounts that you use to store the virtual hard disk (VHD) files that correspond to your VM disks. Azure Unmanaged Disks also have a maximum capacity of 4095 GB.
➝Read more about Azure Unmanaged Disks
Q7. Differentiate between managed and unmanaged disks.
Ans. Managed Disks are managed by Microsoft Azure and you don’t need any storage account while creating a new disk. Since the storage account is managed by Azure you do not have full control of the disks that are being created.
Un-managed Disks is something that requires you to create a storage account before you create any new disk. Since the storage account is created and owned by you, you have full control over all the data that is present on your storage account. Additionally, you also need to take care of encryption, data recovery plans, etc.
Azure Storage Redundancy
To maintain data availability and durability, Azure Storage creates and stores copies of data across multiple locations. This process is called storage replication. The goal is to provide redundancy to protect data against hardware failures, power or network outages.
There are several redundancy options you can choose from. You can replicate data within one region, or you can replicate into a geographically distant secondary region. Additionally, you can enable read access to replicated data located in a secondary region, to provide availability during disasters.
Azure Storage Replication Options
Microsoft Azure supports 4 different replication services, locally-redundant storage, zone-redundant storage, geo-redundant storage, and read-access geo-redundant storage (also known as LRS, ZRS, GRS, and RA-GRS respectively.)
➝Read more about Azure Storage Redundancy
Q8. Why geo-redundancy is used in Azure?
Ans. Azure Storage offers geo-redundant storage to ensure high availability even in the event of a regional outage. Storage accounts configured for geo-redundant replication are synchronously replicated in the primary region, and then asynchronously replicated to a secondary region that is hundreds of miles away.
Q9. Will, we have access to all 3 copies of the data in LRS?
Ans: No, the user doesn’t know which copy is being used. It’s just if one copy is down the second copy becomes available. So users cannot use all 3 copies at a time.
Storage Access Keys
When you create a storage account, Azure generates two 512-bit storage account access keys. These keys can be used to authorize access to data in your storage account via Shared Key authorization. The storage key helps control read and write access to the virtual storage area. You need to choose a storage key that will allow access by those programs that require it. To limit unwanted access by other programs, try to select a storage key different from the PSW key that other programs are likely to use.
➝Read more about Storage Access Keys
Q10. Who is responsible for the security of your Azure storage account access keys?
Ans. Identity Access and Management is responsible for the security of the Azure storage account access keys.
Read more on Identity Access and Management responsibilities
Azure Private Link Endpoint
Azure Private Endpoint is a network interface that connects you privately and securely to a service powered by Azure Private Link. Private Endpoint uses a private IP address from your VNet, effectively bringing the service into your VNet.
The service could be an Azure service such as Azure Storage, Azure Cosmos DB, SQL, etc., or your own Private Link Service.
➝Read more about Azure Private Endpoint
Q11. What is the use of private endpoint in Azure?
Ans. A private endpoint is a special network interface for an Azure service in your Virtual Network (VNet). When you create a private endpoint for your storage account, it provides secure connectivity between clients on your VNet and your storage.
Q12. What are private links and private endpoints in Azure?
Ans. Azure Private Link (Private Endpoint) allows you to access Azure PaaS services over a Private IP address within the VNet. Azure Service Endpoint provides secure and direct connectivity to Azure PaaS services over an optimized route over the Azure backbone network.
Azure Shared Access Signature
A shared access signature (SAS) is a URI that grants restricted access rights to Azure Storage resources. You can provide a shared access signature to clients who should not be trusted with your storage account key but to whom you wish to delegate access to certain storage account resources.
➝Read more about Azure Shared Access Signature
Q13: What are the types of shared access signatures in azure?
Ans: Azure Storage supports three types of shared access signatures:
- User delegation SAS
- Service SAS
- Account SAS
Quiz Time (Sample Exam Questions)!
With our Microsoft Azure Administrator training program, we cover 150+ sample exam questions to help you prepare for the certification AZ-104.
Check out one of the questions and see if you can crack this…
Ques: Which one of the following provides block-level storage volumes for Azure VMs?
A. Azure Disks
B. Azure Blobs
C. Azure Queues
D. Azure Tables
The right answer will be revealed in my next week’s email.
Ques: Can we create VM in Azure using CLI?
A. True
B. False
Answer: A
Yes, The Azure CLI is used to create and manage Azure resources from the command line or in scripts. This quickstart shows you how to use the Azure CLI to deploy a virtual machine (VM) in Azure that runs Windows Server 2019. To see your VM in action, you then RDP to the VM and install the IIS web server.
Feedback
We always work on improving and being the best version of ourselves from the previous session hence constantly ask feedback from our attendees.
Here’s the feedback that we received from our trainees who had attended the session…
Here 2107 is in YYMM format, represents the trainees from the batch of July 2021.
Related/References
- [Recap] Day 4: Azure Network Traffic Management [Azure Administrator] [AZ-104]
- [Recap] Day 5: Azure Virtual Machines [Azure Administrator] [AZ-104]
- Azure Storage Accounts Overview & Steps To Create
- Azure Blob Storage: Features, Usage, And Steps to Create
Next Task For You
Begin your journey towards becoming a Microsoft Azure Administrator [AZ-104] by joining our FREE Class. We strongly recommend gaining knowledge from AZ-104 to be an effective Azure Administrator. Our course covers the AZ-104 certification.
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