Azure Storage Type Differences

 The Azure Storage platform includes the following data services:

• Azure Blobs:

A massively scalable object store for text and binary data. Also includes support for big data analytics through Data Lake Storage Gen2.

 Blob storage is designed for:

• Serving images or documents directly to a browser.
• Storing files for distributed access.
• Streaming video and audio.
• Writing to log files.
• Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.
• Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service.

• Azure Files:

Managed file shares for cloud or on-premises deployments.

Azure Files offers fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry standard SMB or NFS protocol. Azure file shares can be mounted concurrently by cloud or on-premises deployments.

Azure Files SMB file shares are accessible from Windows, Linux, and macOS clients. Azure Files NFS file shares are accessible from Linux or macOS clients. Additionally, Azure Files SMB file shares can be cached on Windows Servers with Azure File Sync for fast access near where the data is being used.

 

• Azure Queues:

A messaging store for reliable messaging between application components.

Azure Queue Storage is a service for storing large numbers of messages. You access messages from anywhere in the world via authenticated calls using HTTP or HTTPS. A queue message can be up to 64 KB in size. A queue may contain millions of messages, up to the total capacity limit of a storage account. Queues are commonly used to create a backlog of work to process asynchronously.

• Azure Tables:

A NoSQL store for schemaless storage of structured data.

Azure Table storage is a service that stores non-relational structured data (also known as structured NoSQL data) in the cloud, providing a key/attribute store with a schemaless design. 

You can use Table storage to store flexible datasets like user data for web applications, address books, device information, or other types of metadata your service requires.

• Azure Disks:

Block-level storage volumes for Azure VMs.

Azure managed disks are block-level storage volumes that are managed by Azure and used with Azure Virtual Machines. Managed disks are like a physical disk in an on-premises server but, virtualized.