Azure storage accounts

It provides a unique namespace for you Azure Storage data that’s accessible from anywhere via HTTP or HTTPS, this data is secure, highly available, durable and massively scalable.

Azure storage redundancy options

Azure storage accounts always store multiple copies of your data, so it’s protected from unplanned and planned events (hardware failure, network and power outages, and natural disasters), meeting its availability and durability targets.

Redundancy in the primary region

Data is always replicated three times.

• Locally Redundant Storage (LRS): It replicates the data three times within a single datacenter. Durability of objects over a given year: 11 nines - 99.999999999%

  

  <aside> 💡 Lowest cost redundancy option and offers the least durability.

  </aside>

  <aside> 💡 Protects data against server rack and drive failures, but if a natural disaster occurs within the datacenter all replicas may be lost.

  </aside>

• Zone-redundant storage (ZRS): For Availability Zone-enabled Regions, it replicates your data across three Azure Availability Zones three times.

  Durability of objects over a given year: 12 nines - 99.9999999999%

  

  <aside> 💡 Recommended for scenarios that require high availability and for restricting replication of data within a country or region to meet data governance requirements.

  </aside>

  <aside> 💡 With it, data is still accessible for both read and write operations even if a zone becomes unavailable.

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Redundancy in the secondary region

For apps requiring high durability, copy the data to a secondary region that is miles away from the primary region, to make the data durable even in case of an event of catastrophic failure that prevents data in the primary region from being recovered.

<aside> 💡 If the primary region becomes unavailable, you can choose to fail over the secondary region, so it becomes the primary region, and you can read and write data.

</aside>

• Geo-redundant storage (GRS): It copies the data synchronously three times within a physical location in the primary region using LRS and then copies your data asynchronously to a single physical location in the secondary region (the region pair) using LRS.

  Durability of objects over a given year: 16 nines - 99.99999999999999%

  

• Geo-zone redundant storage (GZRS): Data is copied across three Azure Availability Zones in the primary region (similar to ZRS) and is also replicated to a secondary geographic region using LRS, for protection from regional disasters.

  Durability of objects over a given year: 16 nines - 99.99999999999999%

  

  <aside> 💡 It combines the high availability provided by redundancy across availability zones with protection from regional outages provided by geo-replication.

  </aside>

• Read access to data in the secondary region:

  Geo-redundant storage (with GRS or GZRS) replicates your data to another physical location in the secondary region to protect against regional outages. However, data is available to read only if a failover is initiated from the primary to the secondary region. So for read access to the secondary region, enable read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) or read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA-GZRS).

Account type

When creating a storage account, the storage account type must be picked as this determines the storage services and redundancy options, which has an impact on use cases.

• Queue storage.
• Table storage.
• Azure files. | LRS, GRS, RA-GRS, ZRS. GZRS, RA-GZRS. | Standard for blobs, file shares, queues and tables. | | Premium block blobs | - Blob storage (including data lake storage). | LRS, ZRS. | Premium for block blobs and append blobs. For scenarios with high transaction rates and that use smaller objects. | | Premium file shares | Azure files | LRS, ZRS. | Premium for file shares only. For high-performance scale apps. | | Premium page blobs | Page blobs only | LRS. | Premium for page blobs only. |

Azure storage services

Azure blobs (Binary Large Objects)

Object storage solution for the cloud, to store massive amounts of unstructured data (text files, images, videos, documents, binary data), meaning there are no restrictions on the kinds of data it can hold.