Azure Storage

Question 1

What types of Storage do Azure Storage Services comprise?

Answer 1

• Container (Blob) Storage (unmanaged storage) / Azure Storage (GPv2)
• Disk Storage - for Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs) (managed storage)
• Azure File Storage
• Storage tiers
• considered as Infrastructure as a Service

Question 2

Describe Azure Storage?

Answer 2

• also called GPv2
• “standard storage”
• can contain four types of data: Container, File, Queue, Table
• can hold up to 5 Petabytes (PB)
• pay for what you use
• extremely cheap cloud storage, about 2ct per GB per month
• not recommended for high-demand workloads

Question 3

How are Azure Storage and Data Lake connected?

Answer 3

• when setting up Azure Storage (GPv2) you can choose to turn it into data lake
• data lake is extremely large data storage
• good for “big data” analytics

Question 4

Describe Premium Storage Options

Answer 4

• Blob storage - can only hold containers (blobs) - can choose block blobs or page blogs
• File storage
• Uses premium SSD (solid state disks)
• Triple the operations per second (OPS)
• lower latency (time to first byte)
• more expensive

Question 5

What high performance options exist for storage?

Answer 5

• Premium SSD
• Premium SSD v2
• Ultra Disk

Question 6

What is a blob?

Answer 6

• Binary Large Object (BLOB)
• files of any type (txt, pdf, zip, jpg, …)
• stored loosely in a container
• public or private
• “unstructured data”

Question 7

Describe Container Storage

Answer 7

• create multiple containers
• each container can contain multiple blobs
• can be organized into folders
• BUT not hierarchical file structure
• pay only what you use
• equal to AWS Simple Storage Service (S3)

Question 8

How is Location important with Storage?

Answer 8

• can create multiple storage accounts in any region of the world
• keep data close to the person/service consuming it (for access speed reasons)
• price varies by region

Question 9

How does Azure deal with redundancy?

Answer 9

• Azure keeps 3 copies of your data by default
• Locally- or zone-redundant
• Azure will almost never, ever lose a file once it’s successfully received it

Question 10

What is global redundancy?

Answer 10

• chooseable for storage
• Azure keeps 6 copies of data
• 3 locally and 3 in another region of the “geo”
• Honors data sorvereignity laws

Question 11

What Access Tiers exist in Azure?

Answer 11

• Hot: default, balanced access
• Cool: can be set as default, cheaper storage with more expensive read/write operations
• Cold: much cheaper storage, more expensive read/write operations
• Archive: cannot get inmediate access to files, cheapest storage, most expensive operations

Question 12

What do Access Tiers of Storage describe?

Answer 12

• the balance between of if its cheaper to storage data than to retrieve it or the other way around

Question 13

What is the concept of Failover in Azure?

Answer 13

• Hard disk fail ever so often
• Azure takes of that
• 3 copies of your data, they can use one of other copies to recreate it

Question 14

What is Lifecycle management in Azure Storage?

Answer 14

• allows to automate pushing files from hot to cool and from cool to archive based on certain rules

Question 15

What applications can be used to access a storage account directly/programmaticly?

Answer 15

• Storage Explorer (downloadable Software)
• Storage Browser (in the browser)

Question 16

How do you copy data between two storage accounts?

Answer 16

multiple ways:
- manually download & upload
- copy data inside Azure Network via CLI tool called AzCopy

Question 17

What is Azure File Storage?

Answer 17

• true hierarchical structure with folders
• you can “mount” this storage to a server and use a drive letter with it
• supports SMB protocol or NFS (Linux)

Question 18

Why do we need Azure Files?

Answer 18

• Replace or supplement your on-prem file storage
• Lift and shift migration to the cloud
• adds redundancy, data recovery, failover benefits

Question 19

What is Azure File Sync?

Answer 19

• Hybrid option - on prem files with cloud option
• Cloud tiering -> most popular files stored locally, all files stored in cloud
• distributed access
• Cloud backup

Question 20

What is Azure Migrate?

Answer 20

• tool for migration onto cloud
• will examine your existing environment and make recommendations that will make move to cloud easier
• guided experience
• also helps discover servers and databases in environment

Question 21

What is Azure Data box?

Answer 21

• suite of products
• it may be impractical to upload some quantities of data to the cloud
• will be mailed to you, you fill it with data and mail it back
• will show up in your account
• data will be encrypted in transit and wiped afterwards from box

Question 22

What is part of the Azure Data box suite?

Answer 22

• Data Box - 100 TB
• Data box disk - 8 TB
• Data Box Heavy - 1 PB

Question 23

What Data redundancy options exist?

Answer 23

• Geo-redundant storate (GRS)
• Geo-Zone redundant storage (GZRS)
• Zone redundant storage (ZRS)
• Locally redundant storage (LRS)

Question 24

What is Locally redundant storage (LRS)?

Answer 24

• replicates data 3 times within a single data center in primary region

Question 25

What is zone-redundant storage (ZRS)?

Answer 25

- replicates storage account synchronously across **three Azure Availability Zones** in primary region - each AZ is physically seperate location with independent power, cooling and networking

Question 26

What is Geo-redundant storage (GRS)?

Answer 26

- redundancy in secondary region - 1. using LRS redundancy is created - 2. copies data asynchronously to single physical location in secondary region, then using LRS copied three times

Question 27

What is Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS)?

Answer 27

- copies data across three AZs in primary region using ZRS - then using LRS in secondary region three additional times

Question 28

What Data redundancy option is the cheapest?

Answer 28

- Locally-redundant storage (LRS)