Storage is an essential part of anything what you do in your day-to-day life and same applies to technology as well. Microsoft Azure Storage is a managed service provided by Microsoft cloud services. When you use any product or service, availability, resiliency, performance, scalability, durability, pricing, security and delivery play an important role, and here in case of Azure Storage it is all taken care by Microsoft.

Azure Storage provides two type of storage accounts: General Purpose and Blob.

While Azure Storage provides services in the following types:

Blob storage

File storage

Queues storage

Table storage

Disk Storage

Storage accounts and services are tightly integrated with each other. To use any one of the above service, you first create a storage account then you define the storage services based on the storage account type.

First, let understand the Storage accounts by an illustration:

Now, let understand the storage accounts in detail:

General purpose: A general purpose storage account cater all your azure storage services such as Tables, Queues, Files, Blobs and Azure virtual machine disks under a single account. This type of storage account has two performance tiers:

• Standard storage performance tier: This performance tier fulfills all your data storage needs such as Tables, Queues, Files, Blobs and Azure virtual machine disks. This tier supports block blobs, page blobs and append blobs.
• Premium storage performance tier: This performance tier is backed by SSDs and provides high performance IOPS, best for virtual machine disks and data intensive applications such as database. This tier supports only page blobs.

Currently, these general-purpose accounts are available in 2 versions.

General purpose v1: It is previous version of storage account and doesn’t provide latest and greatest storage capabilities, which is certainly available with new kind of storage. It also doesn’t provide access tier (Hot and Cold).

General purpose v2: This is a newer version of general purpose v1 storage and provide all the features, which are part of v1 storage. It also provides all the latest features available for blob, files, queues and tables with better performance and pricing. It also supports the access tiering (Hot and Cold) for different needs and performance.

You can upgrade your GPv1 account to GPv2 account, using PowerShell and Azure CLI.

Blob: A blob storage account is mainly to store unstructured data as blob (objects). It also provides access tier (hot and cold) to support different needs and performance. It only supports block blobs and append blobs. It provides only standard performance tier.

Access tiers: Access tiers are supported by General purpose V2 storage account and blob storage account to serve different needs.

• A Hot access tier indicates that the objects in the storage account will be more frequently accessed. This allows you to store data at a lower access cost. Premium storage always falls under this access tier.
• A Cool access tier indicates that the objects in the storage account will be less frequently accessed. This allows you to store data at a lower data storage cost.