Azure Storage – Gaining the Azure Data Engineer Associate Certification
Azure Storage is a suite of modern storage solutions, all of which are massively scalable, secure, reliant, and accessible. When you need one of the offered Azure Storage services, you create what is called an Azure Storage Account. The storage account is where you can choose certain attributes that apply to all the services within it—for example, performance and redundancy details.
Performance
An Azure Storage Account has two performance options:
- Standard is recommended for most scenarios and is referred to as a general‐purpose v2 account. When you visualize storage, a hard drive might pop into your mind. What you have in mind is likely a hard disk drive (HDD). The speed of data access via an HDD is impacted by its proximity to the consumer and the magnetic heads reading from and writing to the platters. This is very fast and acceptable for most use cases, and it is what you get when you provision a Standard Azure Storage Account.
- Premium results in the provisioning of solid‐state drives (SSDs), which are very low latency. Instead of physically aligning magnetic nibbles on a platter, the data is loaded into a memory chip, making it instantly accessible. If any of the following scenarios meet your requirements, then you should choose Premium which, is supported by a general‐purpose v2 account:
- Artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) processing
- IoT or streaming scenarios
- Data transformation solutions that require constant editing or modification that needs to be reflected immediately
- Real‐time applications that must write data quickly
Storage Redundancy
It is important to have your data stored in more than one place. For example, if you have your data in one datacenter and the datacenter loses power, you are out of business until the power is restored. If a storm destroys the datacenter and everything within it, then you are likely out of business for good if that is the only place you have stored your data. Azure Storage provides six options for storing your data into different Azure datacenters. They are described in Table 1.6.
TABLE 1.6 Azure storage redundancy
| Option | Acronym | Description |
| Locally redundant storage | LRS | Replicated 3 times within a single datacenter |
| Zone‐redundant storage | ZRS | Replicated to 3 datacenters in the same region |
| Geo‐redundant storage | GRS | LRS + replicated to another region |
| Geo‐zone‐redundant storage | GZRS | ZRS + replicated to another region |
| Read‐access GRS | RA‐GRS | Read access GRS |
| Read‐access GZRS | RA‐GZRS | Read access GZRS |
LRS is straightforward in that you get three isolated copies of your data within a single datacenter. If there is any issue with a copy, Azure will take care that access is redirected to another copy. Most of the time, the redirection happens so fast you won’t even notice. With ZRS, instead of having three copies of your data in the same datacenter, your three copies are in three different locations, but in the same region. A region may be an area like West Europe, South Central US, or UK South. Within each region, there are numerous datacenters (typically three) that service Azure customers, and those multiple datacenters are referred to as zones. Each region also has what is sometimes referred to as a paired region. For example, West Europe’s paired region is North Europe, and South Central US is paired with North Central US. The regions exist in the same geography (or geo). GRS copies three times in one local datacenter, like LRS, and stores another copy in a different geographical location. With GZRS your data is copied into three datacenters in the first region and zones (ZRS) and then copied three times to one datacenter in another region. The read‐access option means that only the primary copy of your data is writable and the other copies are read only.
Azure Storage is a suite of modern storage solutions, all of which are massively scalable, secure, reliant, and accessible. When you need one of the offered Azure Storage services, you create what is called an Azure Storage Account. The storage account is where you can choose certain attributes that apply to all the services within…
