Resources

Blob storage is made up of three different resources:

• Storage account
• Container
• Blob

Storage accounts

A storage account provides the base namespace for your stored blobs. For example, if your storage account is named mystorageaccount, then the default endpoint for Blob storage is:

http://mystorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net

Containers

A container organised a set of blobs, similar to a file system directory. A storage account can contain an unlimited number of containers. A container can contain an unlimited number of blobs.

Container names must be valid DNS strings, because they form part of the access path for the blobs stored inside. Additionally, the following name restrictions apply:

• between 3 and 63 charactes
• start with a letter or number
• only contain lowercase alphanumeric + dash (-) characters
• Two or more consecutive dash characters (--) are not allowed

http://mystorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer

Blobs

There are three different types of blob in Azure Storage:

• Block:
  • store text and binary data
  • made up of blocks of data that can be managed individually
  • up to 190.7TiB
• Append
  • similar to block blobs
  • optimised for appending
  • ideal for logging scenarios
• Page
  • random access files up to 8TB in size
  • commonly used to store virtual hard drive (VHD) files to serve as VM disk space