As part of our blog series Getting Started with Azure – Solutions You can Deploy in 10 Minutes or Less, we take you through Azure’s many storage options and benefits.
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Being able to store data in the cloud is one of the technology’s most useful benefits, because you get to store data on hardware you don’t pay for or maintain, and if you need more, you simply click a button and boom, seconds later, it’s yours.
You only pay for what you use, redundancy is built in so you won’t ever lose your data, it’s available for a guaranteed 99.9% of the time, and you get to use it for all kinds of handy things like backing up vital data, fast restores, and supporting web apps.
It’s a technology the big companies want you to be able to count on, and they do everything in their power to make sure that’s exactly what you can do. Also, they don’t like being sued for dropping the ball, so they are super-motivated to take good care of you and your data.
Nothing short of an extinction-level natural disaster can wipe out data stored in the cloud as the datacentres it’s stored in are literally all over the world. It’s also far cheaper than building and maintaining your own hardware, so it’s no wonder companies are flocking to it.
Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, is one of the most popular cloud destinations as Microsoft has worked hard to flesh out its capabilities and keep its pricing competitive.
It’s been so successful, that CEO Satya Nadella’s 2015 prediction of Microsoft reaching a target of $20 billion in cloud revenue by 2018, became reality in October 2017.
Azure’s storage options include Blob, File, and Queue, as well as “cool storage” for large amounts of rarely-accessed data that can be stored at a lower cost.
Microsoft has put together a very useful introduction to all of Azure’s storage options, which you can find here. That page will cover everything you need to know to get going with an Azure-based data storage solution, including:
- Azure Storage services
- Types of storage accounts
- Accessing your blobs, queues, and files
- Encryption
- Replication
- Transferring data into or out of storage
- The many storage client libraries available
The page also includes a great deal of information for developers looking to code Azure’s storage services into their own creations, and covers the following programming languages:
- .NET
- Java/Android
- Node.js
- PHP
- Ruby
- Python
To get started, click here for all the info. You can also contact the CSP team at Tarsus On Demand to consult with one of their experts on Azure’s storage options.
