Learning Microsoft Azure Storage

Front-End layer

The Front-End layer is responsible for receiving incoming requests, their authentication, and authorization, and then delivers them to a partition server in the Partition layer.

You may wonder, how does the frontend know which partition server to forward each request to? The answer is pretty easy, because the frontend caches a partition map.

And here, a new question will pop up, what is a partition map? It is responsible for keeping track of the partitions of the storage service being accessed, and which partition server controls access to each partition in the system.