What is blob storage?

This is an object storage solution in the cloud (Azure), it is used to store unstructured data. Unstructured data is data that doesn't adhere to a particular data model or definition, such as text or binary data.

#Why use blob storage?

• blob storage is highly scalable

• high availability

• Strong consistency.
• Disaster recovery.

• low cost, tiered storage.

  Blob storage is designed for :

• serving images directly to a browser.

• Writing long files.
• streaming video and audio.
• Storing data for backup and restore and archiving.
• storing data for distributed access.

About Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2

Blob storage supports Azure Data lake Storage Gen2, Microsoft's enterprise big data analytics solution for the cloud. Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 offers a hierarchical file system as well as the advantages of Blob storage.

more info on Data lake Storage Gen2

Blob storage resources

Blob storage offers three types of resources:

• The storage account
• A container in the storage account
• A blob in a container

##Containers A container organizes a set of blobs, similar to a directory in a file system, a storage account can include an unlimited number of containers, and a container can have an unlimited number of blobs.

Azure Storage supports three types of blobs:

Block blobs store text and binary data. Block blobs are made up of blocks of data that can be managed individually. Block blobs can store up to about 190.7 TiB. Append blobs are made up of blocks like block blobs, but are optimized for append operations. Append blobs are ideal for scenarios such as logging data from virtual machines. Page blobs store random access files up to 8 TiB in size. Page blobs store virtual hard drive (VHD) files and serve as disks for Azure virtual machines.