What is Azure Blob Storage
Object storage used for the cloud - optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data.
What is blob storage designed for?
Serving images or documents directly to a browser
Storing files for distributed access
Streaming video and audio
Writing to log files
Backups
Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or azure-hosted service
How can you access azure blog storage objects?
Via REST API, Azure powershell, Azure CLI, or Azure Storage client library
What are the types of storage accounts?
v1 - old standard type, not offered
v2 - Standard - most recommended
Premium - uses solid-state drives.
Choose between block blobs, page blobs, or file shares.
What are the access tiers for block blob data? What is another name for these tiers?
Hot - frequent access of objects
Cool - Storing large amounts of data that is infrequently accessed and stored for at least 30 days
Archive - Several hours of retrieval latency, but remain for at least 180 days. Most cost effective
Another name is the blob lifecycle.
What are the blob storage resource types?
- Storage account
- Container in the storage account
- Blob in the container
What would the account access be for the mystorageaccount
http://mystorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net
What are the types of blobs?
- Block blobs - for binary data and text
- Append blobs - optimized for append operations
- Page blobs - Store random access files up to 8 TB in size. Store virtual hard drive files
Is Azure storage encrypted?
Yes, automatically by Storage Service Encryption (SSE)
How can you specify encryption keys for Azure Storage?
- customer-managed - key provided for encrypting for Blob storage and Azure files
- customer-provided - on blob storage operations. Can add it with the request to have granular control over encryption.
What is LRS, ZRS, GRS, and GZRS?
- LRS - Locally redundant storage - three times copies within a single physical location in the primary region.
- ZRS - Zone-redundant storage - Copies your data synchronously across three azure availability zones in the primary region
- GRS - Geo-redundant storage - copies your data three times within a single physical location in the secondary region
- GZRS - Geo-zone-redundant storage - Copies your data across to a single physical location in a secondary region, and three times in the primary region across three availability zones.
How would you create an Azure storage from Azure CLI? Start from beginning
az group create –name –location
az storage account create –resource-group –name –location –kind BlockBlobStorage –sku Premium_LRS
What redundancy types does cold, hot, and archive blobs support?
All, except for Archive which is only LRS, GRS, and RA-GRS. No zone stuff.
How is a lifecycle management policy set for azure blobs?
Through a collection of rules in a JSON document. Each rule definition has a filter set and an action set.
Generally each rule will have:
- name
- type
- definition
How are lifecycle rules structured?
{
"name": ,
"type": "Lifecycle",
"Definition": {
"filters": {},
“actions”: {
}
}
}
What are some rule actions for lifecycle of blobs?
tierToCool
tierToArchive
delete
Generally have
daysAfterModificationGreaterThan
or
daysAfterCreationGreaterThan
What is a Re-hydrate policy?
Rehydrating is where you bring the offline archive data to online.
- You can either set the blob tier operation
- Coy blob or copy blob from url operation - most recommended approach
What are the namespaces offered in .NET for working with Azure Blob Storage?
BlobClient - manipulate azure storage blobs
BlobClientOptions - Client configuration
BlobContainerClient - Access and manipulate storage containers
BlobServiceClient - Provies the top-level namespace for the blob service
BlobUriBuilder - Convenient way to modify the contents of a uri instance to point to different azure storage resources.
How can you access container properties and metadata using .NET?
Functions part of BlobContainerClient:
- GetProperties
- GetPropertiesAsync
- SetMetadata
- SetMetadataAsync
What is Azure Cosmos DB?
A globally distributed functional document database. that is highly available across multiple regions.
What is an cosmosDB container?
Fundamental unit of scalability - the throughput and storage is managed horizontally.
What is the difference between dedicated provisioned throughput mode and shared provisioned throughput mode?
Dedicated exclusively reserves a container and is backed by an SLA.
Shared means containers share provisioned throughput.
What are the Azure Cosmos DB consistency levels?
- Strong
- Bounded Staleness
- Session
- Consistent Prefix
- Eventual
What consistency level would you need for most real-world scenarios?
- Recommended session consistency
