Describe Azure Blob Storage Flashcards
What is Azure Blob Storage?
A service that lets you store massive amounts of unstructured data, or blobs, in the cloud.
What is a blob?
A Binary Large OBject.
What are the three blob types supported in Azure?
Block blobs, Page blobs and Append blobs.
What is a block blob?
A set of blocks of data no more than 100 MB. It can contain up to 50,000 blocks.
What is an append blob?
A block blob optimised for append operations. You can only add blocks to the end of an append blob; updating or deleting existing block isn’t supported.
What is a page blob?
A blob that organised into a collection of 512-btye pages. It is optimised for random read and write operations.
How much data can a block blob, append blob and a page blob hold respectively?
A little over 4.7 TB, 8 TB and a little over 195 GB.
What are the three access tiers for blobs?
Hot, Cool and Archive.
What is the Hot access tier used for?
For blobs that are accessed frequently. It is stored on high-performance media.
What is the Archive access tier used for?
Historical data that mustn’t be lost, but needed rarely. To retrieve a blob from the Archive tier you’ll need to rehydrate it first.
What is the Cool access tier used for?
For data that is accessed infrequently.
How can you manage a blob’s lifetime?
By using lifetime management policies.
What are the common uses of Azure Blob Storage?
Serving images or documents directly to a browser, in the form of a static website.
Storing files for distributed access.
Streaming video and audio.
Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery and archiving.
Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure hosted service.
What management benefits do Azure Blob Storage provide and what do they do?
Redundancy - so the service has high availability
Versioning - for maintaining and restoring blobs from earlier versions
Soft delete - enables you to recover an overwritten or removed blob.
Snapshots - provides read-only version of a blob at particular point in time.
Change Feed - provides an ordered, read-only, record of the updates made to a blob.
What can you use change feed for?
Updating or synchronising in content management scenarios.
Extracting business analytics, insights and metrics, based on changes to the blobs, either as a stream or batch process.
Store, audit and analyse blob changes for security, compliance or intelligent for enterprise data management.
Build solutions to back up, mirror, or replicate object state for disaster management or compliance.
Build connected application pipelines that react to change events or scheduled executions based on created or changed objects.
