Chapter 10
Leveraging Blob Storage
What’s In This Chapter?
- How blobs and Blob storage works
- How to program Blob storage
- How to create, list, and delete a container
- How to manage blobs
- How to manage access to blobs
Storage is important for applications, and understanding how to put information into storage and retrieve it is the backbone of applications. The Azure Storage System provides storage for all your cloud-based storage needs including tabular, blobs, and queues. This chapter explains how to leverage Blob storage to effectively store, retrieve, and manage your large binary files.
Understanding Blobs and Blob Storage
Binary Large Objects (blobs) have been in IT vocabulary for quite a while. Blobs are simply binary files and are commonly but not exclusively multimedia files; they can be any type of file from images, videos, audio, and to documents. Many of the files you may access on a day-to-day basis could be consider a blob. Consider the video you watch online, the file that contains the data viewed in Microsoft Excel, or even this book if you are reading it on a computer or mobile device. These files are large binary files that can be considered a blob. Microsoft SQL Server has supported the storage of them within a database for some time. With Azure Storage you now have a support to Blob storage in the cloud.
As part of its Storage services, Azure supports the storage and retrieval of large unstructured files using Blob storage. Therefore to understand blobs and Blob ...
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