What is Azure Storage?
Azure Storage is a cloud storage service provided by Microsoft as part of the Azure cloud platform. It provides highly scalable, available, and durable storage for any kind of data, including structured, unstructured, and NoSQL data.
Some of the key capabilities and benefits of Azure Storage include:
- Blob storage for storing files, images, documents, backups etc. This includes block blobs for text and binary data, append blobs for logs, and page blobs for random access files.
- Queue storage for build reliable messaging queues for workflow processing and communication between application components.
- Table storage which provides a NoSQL key-attribute data store for rapid development using massive semi-structured datasets.
- File storage for legacy applications requiring file shares.
- Disk storage for Azure virtual machine disks for storing OS, applications, and data.
- All storage accounts have replication options for high availability, including locally redundant storage, zone redundant storage, geo redundant storage etc.
- Data encryption both in-transit and at-rest for security.
- Integrates well with other Azure services like Azure compute, database, analytics etc.
Some popular use cases for Azure Storage are backup, archiving, big data analytics, media storage for streaming video and CDNs, data lakes and warehouses,static website hosting, container storage, disaster recovery and more. It provides the storage foundation for most Azure-hosted services and applications.
Wasabi, Google Cloud Storage, Rackspace, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Brick FTP, MakeSpace, Webzilla Instant Files, DreamObjects, SmartFile, Newfang, Go4hosting, Choopa Cloud Storage, Hosting24, DealonCloud, Rackspace Cloud Files are some alternatives to Azure Storage.