Understanding Azure Blob Storage

• Azure Blob storage provides object-based storage for large amounts of unstructured data, with options to meet several scenarios and redundancy requirements.
• Organizations need to consider the combination of blob type and storage account to deploy, which ultimately determines capabilities, performance, and cost.
• Other Azure services, including Data Lake Storage, VM Disks, SQL Database, and Cosmos DB, leverage blob storage to store data.

Azure Blob storage provides object-based storage for large amounts of unstructured data, in contrast to a structured file system provided by traditional file servers, accessed primarily via HTTP/HTTPS. Most organizations using blob storage will do so indirectly, as part of another Azure service like Azure SQL Database that relies on blobs. However, some organizations will use the service directly for tasks like serving static Web site content, streaming audio or video, or storing data logs. Most such organizations will use Block blobs or Page blobs deployed in a general-purpose v2 storage account, but they should review other options if they have specific requirements for higher performance and redundancy.