An introduction to Azure Storage

Azure Storage is a highly-available and massively-scalable cloud storage platform that is designed to help you build internet scale applications. It is designed to store huge amounts of geo-redundant data with very fast performance. The platform exposes different abstractions of storage services to target different scenarios. This book will cover four service abstractions of storage, which are blobs, tables, queues, and file storage.

These services, like many other services from Azure, are exposed and accessed via REST APIs. Microsoft also provides a set of client libraries built on top of the REST APIs for different platforms like .NET, Android, and Node.js. These libraries facilitate interaction with the storage services, and add additional advanced capabilities like retry logic and asynchronous programming.

Azure Storage enables new scenarios for applications that require scalable and highly available data storage. These include applications such as social networks, video and image serving apps, gaming, medical records, and much more. Consumers will only pay for what they use based on traffic and capacity. Some of the Azure Storage key design features are described in the next sections.