This chapter covers:
- Creating a storage service
- Setting up an Azure Storage Blob service
- Configuring file access in a Blob service
In the previous chapter you explored a set of services provided by Microsoft Azure: Event Hubs, Stream Analytics, Data Lake, Data Lake Analytics, and SQL Database. You saw at a high level how these services can work together to create an analytics system.
This chapter begins showing you how to design and set up these services to lay the foundation of an analytics system. You’ll learn how to implement a storage system that is secure and scalable. The storage system will be a part of the system you build in Azure.
the output of the Serving Layer (Figure 1.2).
Figure 3.1. Lambda architecture with Azure PaaS services
Azure Storage is Microsoft’s first cloud storage service. Azure Storage provides multiple specialized types, of essentially key/value stores: queues, blobs, tables, file shares. Key/value pairs store data in a flat hierarchy. The key is used for lookup, and the value stores simple or complex data. Blob storage and file shares just have a particularly large value, and a key that looks like a file path. Tables are standard key/value stores. Queues store ID and text fields. Azure Storage also provides backing for virtual machine (VM) disks in Azure VMs.