What is Object Storage — Blob Storage in Microsoft Azure?

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Microsoft Azure

Object Storage — Blob Storage

Store massive unstructured data in containers with hot/cool/archive tiers and fine-grained access.

Azure Blob Storage is Azure's object store, part of a Storage Account. Objects (blobs) live in containers and come in three types: block blobs (files, media, backups — the common case), append blobs (logging), and page blobs (VHDs/random access). It underpins data lakes (with ADLS Gen2 hierarchical namespace), backups, and static content, and is designed for high durability via replication.

A warehouse chain with shelves at different price points: front-of-store shelves for fast-moving goods (Hot), a back room for slow items (Cool), and a distant low-cost depot for archives you rarely fetch (Archive) — with optional duplicate warehouses in another city (GRS) in case one burns down.

Key Concepts

Cost and resilience are tuned with access tiers — Hot for frequent access, Cool for infrequent, Cold, and Archive for rarely-accessed data at the lowest price but with rehydration latency — and with redundancy options: LRS (3 copies in one datacentre), ZRS (across zones), GRS/RA-GRS (replicated to a second region). Lifecycle management rules move or delete blobs by age automatically. Access uses Entra ID (RBAC), Shared Access Signatures (time-limited tokens), or account keys, with encryption at rest by default.