Azure Blob Storage
Massively scalable and secure object storage for your cloud-native workloads, archives, data lakes, high-performance computing, and machine learning.
Overview
Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft's object storage solution for the cloud. It is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data. Blob storage is ideal for serving images or documents directly to a browser, storing files for distributed access, streaming video and audio, and storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.
✨ Key Features
- Massive scalability with exabytes of capacity
- Tiered storage options (Hot, Cool, Cold, Archive) to optimize costs
- Durable and highly available with geo-redundancy options
- Secure with encryption at rest and in transit, and fine-grained access control
- Data Lake Storage Gen2 capabilities for big data analytics
- Lifecycle management policies to automate data tiering
🎯 Key Differentiators
- Multiple performance and cost tiers (Hot, Cool, Archive)
- Integrated data lake capabilities (Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2)
- Strong integration with other Azure services
Unique Value: Offers a cost-effective, massively scalable, and secure foundation for storing unstructured data for a wide variety of cloud applications and analytics workloads.
🎯 Use Cases (5)
✅ Best For
- Cloud-native application data storage
- Long-term archival of critical business data
- Staging data for big data analytics pipelines
💡 Check With Vendor
Verify these considerations match your specific requirements:
- Transactional database storage (use Azure SQL or Cosmos DB)
- File shares requiring SMB protocol (use Azure Files)
🏆 Alternatives
Provides a tiered storage model that allows for fine-tuned cost optimization based on data access patterns, and its integration with Azure's analytics services is a key advantage.
💻 Platforms
🔌 Integrations
🛟 Support Options
- ✓ Email Support
- ✓ Live Chat
- ✓ Phone Support
- ✓ Dedicated Support (Professional Direct, Premier tier)
🔒 Compliance & Security
💰 Pricing
✓ 30-day free trial
Free tier: 5GB of LRS-Hot Blob storage with 20,000 read and 10,000 write operations for 12 months.
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