Snap Blob Storage

What is Blob Storage

Azure Blob storage is a service for storing large amounts of unstructured data that can be accessed from anywhere in the world via HTTP or HTTPS. A single blob can be hundreds of gigabytes in size.

An Azure storage account can contain large amounts of blob, queue, and table data. See Azure Storage Scalability and Performance Targets for details about storage account capacity.

Common uses of Blob storage include:

• Serving images or documents directly to a browser
• Storing files for distributed access
• Streaming video and audio
• Performing secure backup and disaster recovery
• Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service

You can use Blob storage to expose data publicly to the world or privately for internal application storage.

Concepts

The Blob service contains the following components:

• Storage Account: All access to Azure Storage is done through a storage account. See Azure Storage Scalability and Performance Targets for details about storage account capacity.

• Container: A container provides a grouping of a set of blobs. All blobs must be in a container. An account can contain an unlimited number of containers. A container can store an unlimited number of blobs.

• Blob: A file of any type and size. There are two types of blobs that can be stored in Azure Storage: block and page blobs. Most files are block blobs. A single block blob can be up to 200 GB in size. This tutorial uses block blobs. Page blobs, another blob type, can be up to 1 TB in size, and are more efficient when ranges of bytes in a file are modified frequently. For more information about blobs, see Understanding Block Blobs and Page Blobs.

• URL format: Blobs are addressable using the following URL format:
  http://.blob.core.windows.net//

Snap File Manager app stores images in a Blob service and only image URLs in the SQL database. Using the Blob service keeps the SQL database much smaller than it otherwise would be, makes it possible to scale up to an almost unlimited number of tasks, and can be done.

You can have hundreds of terabytes in a storage account, and the storage cost is much less expensive than SQL Database storage.

 What is Blob storage?

The Azure Storage Blob service provides a way to store files in the cloud. The Blob service has a number of advantages over storing files in a local network file system:

• It's highly scalable. A single Storage account can store hundreds of terabytes, and you can have multiple Storage accounts. Some of the biggest Azure customers store hundreds of petabytes. Microsoft SkyDrive uses blob storage.
• It's durable. Every file you store in the Blob service is automatically backed up.
• It provides high availability. The SLA for Storage promises 99.9% or 99.99% uptime, depending on which geo-redundancy option you choose.
• It's a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) feature of Azure, which means you just store and retrieve files, paying only for the actual amount of storage you use, and Azure automatically takes care of setting up and managing all of the VMs and disk drives required for the service.
• You can access the Blob service by using a REST API or by using a programming language API. SDKs are available for .NET, Java, Ruby, and others.
• When you store a file in the Blob service, you can easily make it publicly available over the Internet.
• You can secure files in the Blob service so they can accessed only by authorized users, or you can provide temporary access tokens that makes them available to someone only for a limited period of time.

Azure Storage Pricing