Develop solutions that use Blob storage Cheatsheets

By Saeed Salehi

November 7, 2022

4 min read

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Part of series

Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure (AZ-204) certification exam Cheatsheets

Designed for:

Serving images or documents directly to a browser.
Storing files for distributed access.
Streaming video and audio.
Writing to log files.
Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.
Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service.

Types of storage accounts

Standard: Standard general-purpose v2
Premium: higher performance by using solid-state drives

Access tiers

Hot: highest storage costs, but the lowest access costs
Cool: storing large amounts of data that is infrequently accessed and stored for at least 30 days
Archive: most cost-effective option for storing data, but accessing that data is more expensive than accessing data in the hot or cool tiers

Blobs

Block blobs: store text and binary data, up to about 190.7 TB
Append blobs: logging data from virtual machines
Page blobs: store random access files up to 8 TB in size,store virtual hard drive (VHD) files and serve as disks for Azure virtual machines.

Storage encryption for data at rest

Encryption key management:

Microsoft-managed keys
customer-managed
customer-provided

Data in an Azure Storage account is always replicated three times in the primary region

Locally redundant storage (LRS): Copies your data synchronously three times within a single physical location in the primary region.
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS): Copies your data synchronously across three Azure availability zones in the primary region

Redundancy in a secondary region

Geo-redundant storage (GRS) copies your data synchronously three times within a single physical location in the primary region using LRS. It then copies your data asynchronously to a single physical location in the secondary region.
Geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS) copies your data synchronously across three Azure availability zones in the primary region using ZRS. It then copies your data asynchronously to a single physical location in the secondary region. Within the secondary region, your data is copied synchronously three times using LRS.

Data Proctection

Container soft delete
Blob versioning (every write operation to a blob in that account results in the creation of a new version.)
Blob soft delete, to restore a blob, snapshot, or version that has been deleted (When blob soft delete is enabled, overwriting a blob automatically creates a soft-deleted snapshot)

Versioning is not supported for accounts that have a hierarchical namespace.

Create the block blob storage account

az storage account create --resource-group az204-blob-rg --name \
<myStorageAcct> --location <myLocation> \
--kind BlockBlobStorage --sku Premium_LRS

Data lifecycle

Azure Blob storage lifecycle management offers a rich, rule-based policy for General Purpose v2 and Blob storage accounts.

Transition blobs to a cooler storage tier (hot to cool, hot to archive, or cool to - archive) to optimize for performance and cost
Delete blobs at the end of their lifecycle
Define rules to be run once per day at the storage account level
Apply rules to containers or a subset of blobs (using prefixes as filters)

Data stored in a premium block blob storage account cannot be tiered to Hot, Cool, or Archive using Set Blob Tier or using Azure Blob Storage lifecycle management

To move data, you must synchronously copy blobs from the block blob storage account to the Hot tier in a different account

Sample Rule

{
  "rules": [
    {
      "name": "ruleFoo",
      "enabled": true,
      "type": "Lifecycle",
      "definition": {
        "filters": {
          "blobTypes": ["blockBlob"],
          "prefixMatch": ["container1/foo"]
        },
        "actions": {
          "baseBlob": {
            "tierToCool": { "daysAfterModificationGreaterThan": 30 },
            "tierToArchive": { "daysAfterModificationGreaterThan": 90 },
            "delete": { "daysAfterModificationGreaterThan": 2555 }
          },
          "snapshot": {
            "delete": { "daysAfterCreationGreaterThan": 90 }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Rule actions

tierToCool
enableAutoTierToHotFromCool
tierToArchive
delete

If you define more than one action on the same blob, lifecycle management applies the least expensive action to the blob.

Add a lifecycle management policy with Azure CLI

az storage account management-policy create \
    --account-name <storage-account> \
    --policy @policy.json \
    --resource-group <resource-group>

Rehydrate blob data from the archive tier

Copy an archived blob to an online tier CopyBlob or Copy Blob from URL
Change a blob's access tier to an online tier Set Blob Tier

Rehydration priority

x-ms-rehydrate-priority header

Standard priority: may take up to 15 hours.
High priority: in under one hour for objects under 10 GB in size.

Changing a blob's tier doesn't affect its last modified time

Create Blob storage resources by using the .NET client library

create a storage account

Your storage account name must be unique within Azure.

az storage account create --resource-group az204-blob-rg --name <myStorageAcct> --location <myLocation> --sku Standard_LRS

Classes in the Azure.Storage.Blobs namespace

BlobClient
BlobClientOptions
BlobContainerClient
BlobContainerClient
BlobUriBuilder

BlobServiceClient blobServiceClient = new BlobServiceClient(storageConnectionString);

Create the container and return a container client object

BlobContainerClient containerClient = await blobServiceClient.CreateBlobContainerAsync(containerName);

Get a reference to the blob

BlobClient blobClient = containerClient.GetBlobClient(fileName);

List the blobs in a container

containerClient.GetBlobsAsync()

Download the blob's contents

BlobDownloadInfo download = await blobClient.DownloadAsync();

Retrieve container properties

var properties = await container.GetPropertiesAsync();

Set container properties

IDictionary<string, string> metadata = new Dictionary<string, string>();

// Add some metadata to the container.
metadata.Add("docType", "textDocuments");
metadata.Add("category", "guidance");

// Set the container's metadata.
await container.SetMetadataAsync(metadata);

// Set the container's metadata.
await container.SetMetadataAsync(metadata);

var properties = await container.GetPropertiesAsync();

Set and retrieve properties and metadata for blob resources by using REST

x-ms-meta-name:string-value

Retrieving properties and metadata For Containers:

GET/HEAD https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer?restype=container

For blobs:

GET/HEAD https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer/myblob?comp=metadata

Setting Metadata Headers

For Containers:

PUT https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer?comp=metadata&restype=container

for Blobs:

PUT https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer/myblob?comp=metadata

HTTP headers supported on containers

ETag
Last-Modified

headers supported on blobs include

ETag
Last-Modified
Content-Length
Content-Type
Content-MD5
Content-Encoding
Content-Language
Cache-Control
Origin
Range

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Develop solutions that use Blob storage Cheatsheets

Part of series

Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure (AZ-204) certification exam Cheatsheets

Types of storage accounts

Access tiers

Blobs

Data Proctection

Data lifecycle

Rule actions

Add a lifecycle management policy with Azure CLI

Rehydrate blob data from the archive tier

Create Blob storage resources by using the .NET client library

Set and retrieve properties and metadata for blob resources by using REST

Upcoming events

Mastering Event-Driven Design

The Leadership Meetup

Coven of Wisdom - Herentals - Spring `24 edition

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