AZ-900 Certification | Quick Notes | Part 3

In continuation with AZ-900 Quick notes series.

Azure Storage Account

• Cloud storage solution for modern data scenarios
• Provides a unique namespace to store data.
• Azure Blob storage — Object storage solution for unstructured data. Ideal for serving images and documents directly to browser.
• Azure File Shares — Manages fully managed files stores in cloud. Can be used to mount files shares from a local network to cloud.
• Azure Disk Storage — Provide disk storage for VMs.
• Azure Table Store — NoSQL data store for key value pairs.
• Azure Queue — Asynchronous message queue
• Hot tier — frequent data, Cold Storage — Infrequently accessed stored for 30 days, Archieve Storage — Rarely accessed stored for 180 days.

Azure Storage Redundancy

• Azure stores multiple copies of data to ensure availability and durability in case of failures.
• Its important to decide which redundancy is better for your scenario considering the trade-off between low cost and high availability.
• By default the data is replicated three times in primary regions with local redundant storage or zone redundant storage.

Local Redundant Storage

• Replicates data 3 times with 99.99% SLA.
• Low cost option,provides protection against server racks or drive failure however doesnt work in case of fire or flooding.

Zone Redundant Storage

• Replicates data across 3 availability zone in primary region.
• No remounting is required from connected clients
• Preferred for application with high durability

Redundancy in secondary region

• Azure Storage offers two options for copying your data to a secondary region: geo-redundant storage (GRS) and geo-zone-redundant storage (GZRS).
• GRS is similar to running LRS in two regions.
• GZRS is similar to running ZRS in the primary region and LRS in the secondary region.
• By default secondary region is not available for read or write unless there is failover to secondary region.
• The interval between the most recent writes to the primary region and the last write to the secondary region is known as the recovery point objective (RPO).
• The RPO indicates the point in time to which data can be recovered. Azure Storage typically has an RPO of less than 15 minutes, although there’s currently no SLA on how long it takes to replicate data to the secondary region.

Geo-Redundant Storage

• Copies data synchronously three times in primary region using LRS.
• Copies data asynchronously to single location in secondary region using LRS.
• Offers durability 99.99999999999999% over a given year.

Geo-Zone Redundant Storage

• Data is copied across three availability zone in primary region using ZRS.
• Also copied to secondary region using LRS for protection from natural disaster.
• Provides durability 99.99999999999999% over a given year.

Azure Storage Services

• Azure Blobs : Store for text and binary data.
• Azure Files : Managed files shares for on-prem or cloud.
• Azure Queues : Messaging store for reliable messaging.
• Azure Disks : Block level storage volumes for Azure VMs
• Azure Tables : NoSQL table option for structured , non relational data.

Azure Data Migration Tools

— Azure Migrate :

• Helps migrate from on-premise to cloud
• Provides tools for assessment and migration and a unified migration platform.

— Integrated tools:

• Azure Migrate : Discovery and assessment
• Azure Migrate : Server Migration
• Data Migration assistant
• Azure Database migration service
• Azure app service migration assistant
• Azure Data Box

Azure Data Box — Helps in physical migration used to transfer data of size greater than 40 TBs

Azure File Movement

Azcopy : Command line utility used to copy blobs or files to and from storage account

Synchronizing blobs or files with AzCopy is one-direction synchronization.

Azure Storage Explorer
Graphical interface to manage files and blobs in your Azure account.

Azure File Sync
Tool that allows to centralise your file shares in Azure files .

Once set up on Windows server it will automatically stay bi-directionally synced with files in Azure.