for any data architecture that you're building out having storage is going to be a critical
component we're going to focus on here today azure blob storage and azure files i actually found a
pretty nice way to explain the differences if we look at this here azure blob is object storage
this is where you're going to store massive amounts of data unstructured data that does
not really need to be any specific type whereas the file storage is more like a typical hard drive
once it's mounted they have some great examples of when you would use blob storage like we said
maybe images streaming log files backups just big data doesn't have to be specific it's an object
whereas file storage is going to be replacing or supplementing on premise file servers think
of again like a hard drive but we're going to start with blob storage here the name blobs kind
of funky it's always fun to say but the way we're going to set this up is in three parts
we'll set up a blob storage account second we'll create containers you can think of containers as
just different ways to organize all this vast data that's coming in for example videos or pictures
or maybe you have certain applications or source systems where you want to split it up a certain
way that's how you could do that here and then blob is the atomic level here these are those
individual files or objects that will be uploaded there's three different i guess classifications
of blobs we're not going to get into it too much but you'll see that as we build it will give you
the option for these three and if you ever want to learn a little bit more about these there's
plenty of documentation on azure and i'll link this here as well okay enough of this let's get
into actually building this out we'll start with the blob and then we'll get into the file storage
so what we'll do here back in our azure portal we'll go to more services and all services and
since through all these demos we're using that free tier let's go here to three services front
and center we see the two options here azure blob file storage because it's free it's giving us a
limit looks like five gigabytes but again we're just doing it for demo and learning purposes so
this is plenty create and we'll walk through just how simple it is to actually set this up now here
if we look at subscription and resource group if you're not familiar with what this is take a look
at the other video we walk through these concepts and how to organize it so we'll keep this as is
all right storage account name we have to give this storage account a name again remember
here we're now creating this account instead of production we'll call this kds blob storage
i'm gonna move this to central it's closer to me performance you could pick standard which
is recommended premium if you really need that low latency quick access to all this information
for whatever reason you need that that's something to look into but we'll stick with standard next is
advanced and here you can lock down different security features maybe you don't want it to
be publicly accessible for the blob you can select that here as your directory impacts
there's all sorts of stuff here we're not going to get too specific but again there's a lot of
options here and i think what's important to point out is how you can really lock this down
security wise pretty tightly same with networking here so do you want it to have a public endpoint
so anyone can see it or do you want to have it locked down so only specific networks or ips
can actually get to this so another nice way of restricting access to this data here you can
add some more settings such as soft deletes if you want tags we're not going to add any
review and create all right so it just did a quick validation and that passed now we'll click create
and it gives us this deployment screen so we can see this is deploying if you want to go to uh
inputs and see exactly what values it's using to create this you can check that out here all right
deployment complete let's click go to resource and here we are so we're in our storage account
and what we can do next is create a container and all this information is here this is everything
we've set up it has all configurations and there's there's really all these different things you can
do for this but what we'll focus on is the storage component and if we look here we see containers
let's click in here and there's a default one for logs and here we can create now our
containers if we hop back here now this is where we're at we just created our storage account
now we're going to create a container and upload a specific just a single blob object to this all
right so let's click plus container we'll give this container a name we'll call this
demo container i need to come up with some better naming but whatever um here's another place
where you can restrict access again it's very granular how you can do this on azure in general
security is really as tight as you want it to be and we'll go ahead and create this now it's
created we go in here nothing in here so now let's upload some file now we have this container and
imagine in a real world setting this is where you would have this large amount of unstructured data
consistently flowing in here and and populating your container but what we'll do is manually
upload so i'm going to click upload and select the file i have this json file here it's just
a name and locations nothing special but it's a json file we'll open this and you can have
the setting to overwrite if it already exists some more settings here you can have a specific
folder if you'd like and here's that blob type remember we we mentioned there are three types
here's where you can change that okay so upload and here it is we've officially uploaded our first
blob each blob gets a specific url so you can actually get to that very specific object from
a url some more security options here you can edit you can actually see it so here's the file
that i uploaded like i said it's just very simple but that's what it looks like it's all here you
can change all sorts of properties restrict access you know the whole works and that is the whole
process of the blob storage next let's look at azure files which is going to be that file
storage version which we mentioned is more similar to your traditional hard drive let's go ahead and
do that free services as your file storage let's create this one now we'll run through this here
we it'll be the same options ads file storage central next validation create okay complete
let's go to the resource very similar look and feel it's a storage account it's just a different
type of storage instead of blob its files and everything will look very similar here we can go
to containers and go through the same process that we just did we'll call this demo container create
and we'll upload and i'll just i'll upload a different type of file it's a dock same thing but
the purposes for why you would use them would be slightly different as we've covered if we
go down to storage accounts we can see we have blob storage file storage they're both covered
under here which leads to the last point which is kind of putting this in perspective of the overall
architecture and why you may even want to do this in the first place maybe you just want to upload
files and that's totally fine just use it as your own personal storage but if you're looking for
more of a cloud data architecture here is kind of an overview of what you're doing where this would
actually come into play would be more of this data lake concept you can think of as we mentioned the
blob storage is where you're putting all that big data a lot of it could be unstructured
so you could have sources coming from apis from your source database applications maybe
ftp uploads any of these different types and what it's going to do is get put into some
large storage container or multiple containers and then moved along the way so in this example
maybe you're using something like data factory it could be something else to extract it load it into
your blob storage or maybe this is some sort of streaming process not data factory and then move
it into a data warehouse for example synapse maybe this is snowflake something else and from there
those could be moved into data models like in analysis services which then connect to power bi
and what we're focused on here is blob storage or any storage and it's kind of that landing zone for
all these different types and maybe each of these get their own container as a way to organize it
and if that's not clear we have this visual here from microsoft as well and i think this
this is nice because they have the different icons and and whatnot but you can see here
same concept we have the different data sources and in this case obviously
all microsoft getting put into the storage blob which then get moved from there to something a
little more structured which would be that azure synapse and moved along the way same concept thank
you for watching let me know if you have any questions and we'll see you at the next video