Azure - Storage

1. Object Storage

This is for massively scalable storage of unstructured data like media files, documents, and backups.

Azure Blob Storage: This is the foundational object storage service in Azure, designed to store and retrieve huge amounts of unstructured data. It is highly scalable, durable, and secure.
Primary Use: Ideal for cloud-native applications, data lakes for analytics, streaming video and audio, and storing data for backup, archival, and disaster recovery.
Key Features: It offers several access tiers (Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive) that allow you to optimize costs based on how frequently you need to access your data. Data in the Archive tier has the lowest storage cost but higher retrieval costs and latency.

This provides high-performance, persistent disk storage for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs). It is analogous to a virtual hard drive.

Azure Disk Storage: This service offers persistent, secure block storage volumes that are managed by Azure and used with Azure VMs.
Primary Use: Best suited for data that requires consistent, low-latency access, such as boot volumes for VMs, transactional and NoSQL databases, and other I/O-intensive applications.
Key Features: Azure provides a range of disk types to balance cost and performance, including Standard HDD, Standard SSD, Premium SSD, and the highest-performance Ultra Disk for the most demanding workloads.

These services provide fully managed, shared network file systems in the cloud.

Azure Files: This service offers fully managed file shares that are accessible via the industry-standard Server Message Block (SMB) and Network File System (NFS) protocols. This makes it incredibly easy to "lift-and-shift" applications to the cloud that rely on on-premises file shares.
Primary Use: Ideal for shared configuration files, application data, developer tools, and replacing traditional on-premises file servers or NAS devices.
Azure NetApp Files: Co-developed with NetApp, this is an enterprise-grade, high-performance file storage service. It is designed for the most demanding, mission-critical file-based workloads.
Primary Use: Best for workloads that require extreme performance and low latency, such as high-performance computing (HPC), SAP HANA, and enterprise web applications.

These offerings are optimized for specific, large-scale use cases like big data analytics.

Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS): This is a massively scalable and secure data lake built on top of Azure Blob Storage. Its key feature is the addition of a hierarchical namespace, which organizes data into a directory structure, just like a traditional file system.
Primary Use: It is the foundational storage service for building modern data analytics platforms on Azure. It is optimized for big data analytics frameworks like Apache Spark and Hadoop.

While the Blob Storage Archive tier is used for long-term data retention, Azure also provides a managed backup service.

Azure Backup: This is a fully managed, centralized service that simplifies data protection across your enterprise. It can back up on-premises servers, Azure VMs, Azure Files shares, and SQL/SAP HANA databases running in Azure.
Primary Use: Automating and managing the backup and restore process. It handles the complexity of scheduling, retention policies, and storing the backup data securely (typically in Blob Storage).

This service is designed to bridge on-premises infrastructure with Azure storage.

Azure File Sync: This service allows you to centralize your organization's file shares in Azure Files while maintaining the performance and compatibility of an on-premises file server. It works by installing an agent on a local Windows Server, which synchronizes its data with an Azure file share. Frequently accessed files can be cached locally, while the full dataset resides in the cloud.