Azure storage - Azure Tutorial

I introduced the concept of storage in Azure earlier. Let's talk in a bit more detail about a couple of different storage services in Azure, starting with Blob Storage. So Blob Storage is a way for you to store files in Azure that your applications can access very quickly. It's designed for speed and ease of access. You can store as much as you want in Blob Storage. You can store petabytes of information in Blob Storage if you want to, and those files can be extremely large as well. As a bit of trivia, Blob actually is an acronym that stands for Binary Large Object. We'll go into a bit more detail about Blob Storage in the next slide. But first, let's talk about Azure Files. In Azure Files, as I talked about before, is a way for you to store files in Azure and then access them using a UNC path like backslash, backslash, server name, backslash, share name. In Windows, you can map that to a drive letter. In Linux, you could create a mount point so that you can more easily get to that file share. The really interesting thing about Azure Files is that you You can install a utility on-premises called Azure File Sync. And what it will do is synchronize your Azure File Share with that on-premises server. And that gets even more interesting when you realize that you can install Azure File Sync on any number of servers all across your company, like in different global areas, and have all of those synchronized with one Azure File Share in the cloud. That way people can access those files much more quickly because they don't have to go out of the internet to get to them. Okay, so let's dig a little deeper into Blob Storage. And the first thing I want to talk about is how you're billed for Blob Storage. You have two different billing metrics. One is the storage costs. The other is the access cost. And so storage actually has different tiers of access that allow you to control how much you're charged based on how often you're gonna access those blobs. The first tier is the hot tier. This is actually the default tier. And this is for items that you access very often. It has the highest cost of storage, but your access cost is the lowest out of all the different tiers. Next comes the cool tier. And in the cool tier, you have a slightly lower storage cost than you do in the hot tier, but your access cost is higher. Also, in the cool tier, there's a data retention policy of 30 days. That means you have to leave something in the cool tier for at least 30 days without removing it. Otherwise, you might get charged a fee for early removal. And removal could be deleting it or moving it to a different tier. And we also have the cold tier. This is for items that you access even less frequently than the cool tier. So it has a slightly lower storage cost than the cool tier, but a higher access cost than the cool tier. And the data retention policy in the cold tier is 90 days. And then finally, we have the archive tier. And the archive tier, kind of the same pattern here, lower storage costs in the cold tier, higher access costs than any of the other tiers. And the data retention policy here is 180 days. It's designed for things that you want to archive, but not really access. So that's why your storage cost is the lowest, but your access cost is higher. Now, if you wanna use something that's in the archive tier, you have to do what's called rehydration. What that means is you move it from the archive tier into one of the other tiers, and then you can access it. And by the way, I said the hot tier is the default tier. Why is that? Because all of the other tiers have a data retention policy. And so if you put something in blob storage and the default tier was not the hot tier, but you wanted it to be in the hot tier, as soon as you moved it into the hot tier, you'd get charged a fee for early removal. So that's why the hot tier is the default tier in blob storage.