Hello there and thank you very much for joining us in
this new Azure Portal How To video. Today we will learn
how to use the new storage browser. And we have Misha
Dhar is back with us to show us how to use it. So, thank you
very much for joining us again, Misha.
Thank you so much for having me back, Leon. It’s so
good to be here again. In previous videos, we created a
brand new storage account and then walked through how
to manage it. Today why don’t we look at how we can work
with the data in the storage account using this brand new
storage browser?
That sounds awesome. Let’s see it.
Let’s go.
First, we need to find the storage account we wish to work
with. If you’re looking to find a full list of storage accounts
in your subscriptions, navigate to storage accounts in the
portal and choose the desired account. Since we’ve been
working with this account recently, you can see it under
recent resources. We’re
going to click here to jump right
in. We’re back on the overview page and the entry point to
the storage browser is here on the left, right at the top.
Let’s click on it.
Here we can see key metrics for each of the different sub
resources within the storage account—blobs, files, tables,
and queues. These metrics here refresh a couple times a
day, so please don’t expect it to immediately reflect
changes that you make to the data in your account. Since
we don’t have any data yet in the storage account, these
fields are black. At the top, we provide you a way to delete
or export any favorites or recently used metadata. On the
left, you can see a list of
favorites, recently viewed items,
and entry points to each of the four sub resources. Feel
free to click on any one of them to jump in. At the bottom
of the page, we provide you with another entry point to
the desktop storage explorer app. If you’re looking to
manage your account at scale or multiple accounts at
once without having to
connect to the portal, the desktop
client is a great tool. So, let’s
take a look at our container
service here.
Clicking into blob containers, we are presented with a list
of containers for the blob service. In Azure, every blob
must be stored within a parent container. So, before you
can upload any blobs, you
need to create a container first.
Let’s do that right now. You specify a name, something
simple will do. We click create. And there we go.
So, clicking into the container, we now have a clean slate
with which we can operate. Let’s upload a couple of files
from our local machine.
As you can see, we now have drag and drop functionality
in addition to using a file
browser. I can select a couple of
files and drag them over.
We can choose to overwrite
files, if they already exist. But
since we don’t have any files yet, we can just click upload.
And there we go. All those files are now in this account
saved us blobs. Now that we have these blobs in our
container and in our storage account, there are a lot of
things that we can do with them. We can change the
sorting order in this grid. And, of course, since they were
all uploaded at the same
time, the last modified time is all
the same for them. But if you have blobs modified at
different times, you can do that. You can select a couple of
items or all of them. We can delete blobs. You can download
them. You can even copy and paste them into another
container if you want to move them around.
If you want to see more about an individual blob, we can
click into it to inspect it further.
Here you can see key properties for the blob. You can view
previous versions and snapshots. And you can even view
and edit some blobs depending on the file format. If you’re
looking to reduce the cost of storing a blob that isn’t
accessed or modified regularly, you can change the access
tier to cooler archive. And so, that’s a quick overview of
the blob service.
Let’s take a look at the file service. Popping back up and
clicking over to file shares, it’s actually a very similar
experience. Just like you need a container for your blobs,
you need a file share for your files. So, let’s add one right
now. The transaction optimized here will provide a great
mix of performance in
affordability for most scenarios.
A quick refresh and we should see the file share in this list
here. There it is. Unlike blob storage, a lot of people don’t
use the portal to manage the data in their file shares.
Rather, they connect to this file share from a different
machine, where they mount the file share as a drive. We
tried to provide some guidance on how to do this for your
file shares. Select the file share that you want to connect
to. And then click the connect button in the command bar
at the top. We provide instructions for Windows, Linux,
and Mac OS. Follow the instructions and you should have
no problem connecting to your file share. However, if you
do wish to manage the data
in your file share in the portal,
you can do that too. Let’s
click into the file share and take
a look.
Similar to the blob service, we provide drag and drop
upload capabilities for files
as well. So, let’s bring a couple
more in and upload.
And now anyone connected to your file share will now be
able to access these files. You can delete, copy, and paste,
just like you did with blobs as well. We have similar
creation and management experiences for queues and
messages, as well as tables and entities. In the interest of
time today, we won’t dive into these specifically.
A couple of other items before we wrap up today.
At the beginning, we’ve talked about recently viewed and
favorites over here on the left. And we can view both
easily. To add to your list of favorites, hover over a
container, file share, queue, or table and click the star.
Once you click it, you’ll see it pinned above underneath the
favorites header. This
favorite will persist across your
portal sessions as long as you’re logged in with the same
Azure credentials. To remove a favorite, unclick the star
icon. You can have up to five objects pinned to your
favorite menu at any time.
>> Thank you very much, Misha. This was a great. I
learned a lot and I hope you learned a lot too. Please try
this out. Let us know what you think. Leave us a comment
in the comment section. And one thing to mention, this was
the last part of a three-part series. Misha came three
times to show us, first, how to create a storage account,
then how to manage that storage account, and, finally,
how to put data on that storage account. So, please
watch the three of them. Let us know what you think.
I hope that you enjoy them and look forward to seeing
you in the next video. Bye for now.