Chapter 4. Introduction to Azure Storage
There are two things in the IT world that we can be certain of: when things go wrong, storage and networking are inevitably to blame. I say this as someone who’s worn the hat of a SAN admin in one of my past lives! I was best friends with the networking team. I’m mostly joking (about being best friends), but it doesn’t matter how well an application is designed and written: the foundational infrastructure pieces must be in place to support it. Bear with me in the next couple of chapters as we explore Azure Storage and Azure Networking. These services may be things that you’re tempted to brush over and get to the cool stuff in the later chapters, but there’s a lot of value in spending some time exploring and learning these core services. It won’t make your food taste any better, but it may help your customers as they order their yummy pizza for delivery!
In this chapter, we look at the different types of storage in Azure and when to use them. We also discuss redundancy and replication options for the Azure Storage service, and how to get the best performance for your applications.
Storage may not seem the obvious topic to examine to build and run applications, but it’s a broad service that covers a lot more than you may expect. In Azure, there’s much more available than just somewhere to store files or virtual disks for your VMs.