What is Azure Blob storage account?

BLOB is an abbreviation of Binary Large Objects. It is a data storage solution provided by Microsoft Azure which is known as Azure Blob storage. It is a service offered by Azure used for managing the large amount of unstructured data.

As per Microsoft definition:

“Azure Blob storage is Microsoft's object storage solution for the cloud. Blob storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data. Unstructured data is data that doesn't adhere to a particular data model or definition, such as text or binary data.”

Why does Blob storage be used?

Though it is an object storage solution for the cloud which could deal with massive amount of unstructured data including images, videos, documents, log files or any other binary data.

Some of the reasons why should this be used like-

• Keeping the static content out of your web server to reduce the work load.
• Keeping the large files which are meant to be shared with the clients or for self-reference.
• It is absolutely secured place to keep the large data
• It is a PaaS offering therefore Microsoft manages the underline infra
• It provides strong consistency and ensures the user has superior data integrity
• Since it is REST-based object storage so the data stored in any of the blob storage is accessible from anywhere in the Azure cloud.
• The best solution for keeping the data for backup, restore, archive and management of the data for disaster recovery

How to access Blob storage?

Since this is a REST-based service, it can be accessed through HTTP or HTTPS call.  Any object stored in Blob storage can be accessed via URLs in the internet browsers or scripting solutions like Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI or through code libraries provided for different programming languages including MS.Net, Node.js, Java, Python, Ruby and PHP.

What are the types of Blob storage?

There are three types of Azure Blob storage accounts

Block Blob

• Made up of blocks of data and could be managed individually. It generally keeps the binary data and text data etc.
• Stores up to 4.75 TiB size of data.
• Any large object than the above size is also available in preview and the estimated size is up to 190 TiB

Append Blob

• Mainly used for append operations like storing log information of app or compute
• Made up of blocks similar to block blob.

Page Blob

• Collection of 512-byte pages optimized for random read and write operations
• It stores VHD files and serves as disks for Azure virtual machines.
• The file size can be up to 8 TB

Read out the official documentation of all 3 types of blobs in detail

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/storageservices/understanding-block-blobs--append-blobs--and-page-blobs

Interesting fact-

Difference between TB and TiB

TB is decimal representation of size whereas TiB is binary representation. The TiB is more accurate in size to the usable space. a TB will be represented as a 1000GB whereas a TiB would be represented as 1024. 

Hierarchy of Blob

The Blob storage offers the 3 types of resources

1. The storage account
2. A container and
3. A blob itself

A storage account can contain many containers

A container can contain many blobs