Ever wonder how to manage
large amounts of storage? Structured or unstructured,
you're not sure what to do? You're kind of in a quandary? Well, guess what? Azure Blob Storage service
is going to be the answer. I'm going to show you all
about it and tell you what to do to get it right
the first time, coming up now. Hello, everybody,
my name is Adam Gordon, an entertainer here at ITProTV, coming at you with another
exciting instance of, or episode of, as we say here,
of 'What is Azure?' We'll take a look at all
the different services, capabilities, features, and functions that
make up the Azure fabric and that allow you as somebody
who might be consuming those web services to get
the most out of them. We're going to take a look at and take on Azure Blob Storage in this particular episode, examining it as we always do
using three key questions. What is it? In this case, what is Azure Blob Storage? Why would it be important for
you and or your company? What kind of value can you get out of it and why is it going to make your life a whole lot better? And of course, equally important, and for me the most fun because I get to do stuff, how do we actually implement it? How do you put it to work for you? And how do we make sure you know how to do that correctly, getting the most out of that Azure investment. We're going to begin by talking about what is Azure Blob Storage. When we think about storage in general, regardless of where it is, whether it's in Azure, whether it's local, whether it's in another cloud provider, storage is the idea of being able to take a whole bunch of stuff, right, myself or Sally here is going to help me with our discussion, as the user is going to have pictures and maybe movies and all sorts of stuff associated with those and other containers or categories. And she or I or any of you are going to want to put them somewhere where we can get them back and use them on demand. And oh, by the way, while they're there, make sure they're safe, don't let them get deleted unless we want to get rid of them, make sure we have access to them on demand. And let's throw some security on top and make sure only we and the people we decide that should be seeing it are able to. And when they're stored, make sure we encrypt them and store them securely. Sounds like a lot. But the reality is, this is pretty standard and common practice today. And we can have one or more of those files. Image one, image two, maybe a movie file, an AVI file, and a whole bunch more. In the language of Azure Blob Storage, we call those blobs. Just large amounts of objects, typically unstructured in nature, that are going to be stored in one or more areas. In this case, in the language of Azure Blob Storage, we call those areas containers. And a user who's got an account is going to drive that process. And when we put accounts, containers, and blobs all together, well, we can actually number them so we know what they are. We need at least one user, one account. We need at least one container. And well, we need one or more blobs. And when we put all those things together, we actually have Azure Blob Storage, and we put it to work for us. So the what is actually just the idea of being able to have one or more users create containers that are then going to hold blobs. In plain, simple, old-fashioned language, we're going to take a bunch of our stuff and put it somewhere so we can go back and get it when we want to use it. That somewhere, it's going to be the Azure Cloud, specifically one or more Azure datacenters anywhere in the world. And we're going to be able to access them through the Azure portal and/or, as you're going to come and see when we answer the final question ‘How do we do this?’ using a brand new really cool additional capability in the initial app Microsoft's put together called the Storage Explorer to deal with the graphical interface that's application-driven and make it look just like our Windows File Explorer experience on our desktop. Really, really cool stuff. So when we think about what it is, it's really just this idea of managing our storage at scale, but specifically for these blobs, these unstructured elements. So we want to put in often very large numbers of them, often probably very big files, and putting them in some sort of logical, hierarchical organized area. We call those areas containers. And they're driven by one or more users using access control. So this is what we do. And what Azure Blob Storage allows us to do. Let's talk about why this may be important for you as well as your organization. The reality is that we all have a variety of things we need to keep track of in-store, Sally's not the only person we could put up here. I could put my name, I could put the name of any of you as employees of any organization anywhere and we can make this list endless. We're all going to have information, whether it is going to be a blob or two or hundreds or thousands, and we're going to need to store our stuff. The problem we run into, and it's not just one user storing their stuff, but hundreds, perhaps thousands inside of an individual company across multiple geographies. As our company expands, is we all have a lot of stuff. And that stuff has to be centralized somewhere where not only ourselves, but those that we work with, we collaborate with, and we want to share information with are going to be able to get access to it. If we don't put them, in other words, somewhere like the Azure Cloud using some sort of structured solution like Azure Blob Storage to manage it, organize it, and secure it, well, it's going to be chaos. And we're not going to have any way to really, not only efficiently, but effectively organize our storage, allow people to share that information in meaningful ways, giving them the ability to share those files and download them, access them, change them, upload, and modify them as needed, centrally on demand. And to do so, again, geographically from distributed resource areas around the world. And that's the reality of the modern workplace we work with, we live in, and we operate in today. Whether you're in an office, you're remote, or you're in some hybrid solution that involves both, you need cloud-based access to data, and Azure Blob Storage, as a service, provides that capability for us. And why users and businesses want to use this, and why they need it? It's because we need to be able to do this reliably, consistently, with the backing and the capability of the technology that Microsoft provides. We do it almost, without exception, flawlessly, without there ever being a problem. And on rare occasions, when there is some sort of an outage, we can set our Azure Blob Storage accounts up in such a way that they failover, they become geographically redundant. We have a copy of them in different geographies and if the primary one we go to becomes unavailable, we simply switch immediately. It's not even us, Microsoft does it on our behalf. They switch us over to another one. And it's seamless. It's like the failure never happened. We don't even realize, normally, that we're failing over. We're simply using that solution and we're getting the most out of it. And it's just there. And the good news is it just works all the time. So we've talked about what it is, we've talked at a high level about why it might make sense for businesses to think about doing this. Complexity is going to be centralized, managed, and really evaporates before our eyes when we use a service like this. Because the vendor, in this case, Microsoft, makes all that disappear. We just have a common interface we upload and configure through, it's going to look very similar to our Windows File Explorer, as I will show you. And as a result of that, it becomes easy. And we like easy. And I'm sure all of you like easy as well because it removes complexity but it also instills confidence. Our users are happy and able to do what they need to do. And they're not focused on the complexity of setting up and installing and configuring containers and uploading blobs. They're focused on using this information to drive interaction. And that's really what we want. We want to be able to go through the common front end of the cloud, we want to be able to use our machine, we want to be able to sit there, and we want to be able to bring down one or more of these files, and we want to be able to use it on demand. We don't have to worry about whether it's going to work or not, we just want to know it will. And this is the proposition, the value proposition. It helps us to frame the conversation about why this is so important. So we've talked about what, we've talked about why. But as you know, no good conversation, no good episode on ‘What is Azure?’ is ever complete until we talk about how to get it done. We're going to take a look at how to do that right now and you're going to go with me. And guess what? I've got a special surprise for you. I'm going to show you that cool app and show you how we can do this right from your desktop without even needing to open the Azure portal. All right, everybody. So the most important question of the whole entire discussion, how do we actually get Azure Blob Storage set up? We're in the Azure portal. Now, I know I told you, so we were talking about the why and the what, but we don't necessarily need to use the portal. And I'm going to show you that cool app I mentioned, the Azure Storage Explorer, in just a minute. But we're going to start in the portal. So you can see where we create a storage account. Because the one thing you're not able to do from the Azure Storage Explorer is actually create the storage accounts. Once they're created and set up, you can then manage all aspects of the storage account, the blob services, specifically. You can do all that right from the app. But to initialize the accountant, we got to be in the portal. So we're going to start here. And what we're going to do is go over, use our Home area and our All Services. As we always do, we search. You can see I've already preflighted the search and the storage account icon is there. If you're not seeing it, just simply start searching for storage accounts, you'll be able to select it once it comes up out of the picklist. Now, I do want to show you this because there are going to be two versions of storage accounts and you want to make sure you choose the right one. There's Storage Accounts and there's Storage Accounts (Classic). You want to use the Storage Accounts, the one that's up at the top, which is the newer of the two. We're going to click there to be able to create a brand new one. We're going to get to our storage account resource area. Assuming you have no storage accounts, this will be blank. If you do you'll obviously see them listed the way ours are there. And we're going to be able to create a new storage account by using our Create tool or our function. So let's click there. We're going to get a wizard-driven experience here with some tabs. Pretty straightforward, very common-looking like almost every other experience we have. We have Basic, we have Advanced, Networking, Data Protection, and then the ability to go ahead and jump in. So what we're going to do is just go through here. We're going to provide some general information we need to have the subscription, the Resource Group. Again, if we don't have one, then we'll simply create a new one right from there. We're then going to be asked to provide the name of the storage account, what we call the Instance Details, the Region, and the Performance tier or level. And there are some options here about whether we want to do Standard or Premium. And of course, the kind of Redundancy that we want. I mentioned in my opening discussion about the what, that we could set this up in such a way that it's geo-redundant. There's multiple copies of this in different geographies. If one were to fail, we'd seamlessly be connected to the other and it would be as if it never happened. And we get those options under Redundancy. And there are several of them. As you can see here, we have the ability to do what's called Locally-redundant Storage, Geo-redundant, Zone-redundant, and/or Geo-zone-redundant. And everyone brings its pros and cons, has capabilities. But of course, you're paying for these capabilities. So want to make sure you're familiar with your options and choose appropriately. We would then go in and look at Advanced and we would be able to... let me just provide some basic information here so it doesn't scream at us while we're doing that. We'll just make up a name as long as it's unique. Should be fine. Let's try that. Okay, now it's not going to go ahead and yell at us. And so now you could see from a security standpoint, we need to go ahead and make a bunch of choices here. If you want to enable additional layers of encryption beyond the basic encryption, what we call Data at Rest Encryption is enabled by default. But we can add an extra layer called Infrastructure Encryption. So giving us more capabilities, more security. You want to allow this to be publicly available and accessible through the web, for instance, and have perhaps strangers show up and see our data as well as authorized users. If you want to enable storage account key access using a passkey essentially a alphanumeric string to be able to gain access to the data, and a variety of other versions for security options like TLS, Transport Layer Security capabilities based on minimum version. Do we want to enable the Blob Storage capabilities here to support what's known as NFS, Network File Share capabilities? If we do, we need to make some choices about how to enable that. And what Access Tier? Hot for frequently accessed data. Cold for centrally archived data that's infrequently accessed. And do we want to enable things like large file shares as well as Tables and Queues support? So tabular data support, queue capabilities for automation, as well as Azure file support or Azure file share capabilities. All of that is going to be enabled down at the bottom with different check options. Make our choices. Continue on to Networking. Do we want to be able to provide by default? Public endpoint support meaning all networks can gain access to this and we can go ahead and essentially make it publicly available, just about anybody who knows how to find it or is told where it is. Or do we want a public endpoint, but one that's selectively available, only networks that we decide we want to make available or make it accessible to? So kind of a slightly restricted public persona. Or private. If we choose private, it's only available inside of our virtual networks in Azure and only available to those that we actually specify we want to be able to give access to. You can see there. When we create the private endpoint, we then have to add it and we have to specify some additional information for that. And then under Data Protection, we enable our recovery capabilities for delete protection, soft delete, a variety of additional things that we can do here. Not all of them are specific to blob and blob storage capabilities, but we do have the ability specifically for the Blob Storage service to track versioning and to enable blob change feeds to keep track of modifications and changes and to be alerted to things that are going on. So we can enable those features specifically. We then Review and Create and we create the storage account. Well, let's assume we've done all that and that I am using this storage account right here, which is the one that I have created. And when I create it, I get to see all the information about it, where it's located, the subscription it's in, all the choices I made about configuration. And I can see a nice summary of the services associated with the blob configuration here under Properties. And I could see their current status and I can edit and turn on and off those capabilities right from here. Those links will take me to areas over here to configure a variety of things. In addition, I can come in under Data Storage and I can start to begin to create the second and then ultimately the third pieces of the puzzle. I have the user and the storage account. That was the first thing we need. Now I can create a container. Think of the container as nothing more than a big filing cabinet that we're going to put in a room and that room is the Azure data center. And then we're going to simply open that file cabinet, pull out a drawer, and start sticking folders and files with the stuff in those drawers. And the folders in the files are going to be the blobs. And so when we think about the diagram we saw on the lightboard as I was talking about what this is, we had the actual user account, Sally. We then had the container, one or more pictures, movies. We then had blobs that represented the actual elements of data. So we can work with those containers, create them, and actually interact with them, as well as uploading the blobs right from here. Remember, I told you, we could do this all outside the portal as well. But let's quickly, since we're here, see what it looks like. Our container would have to be created. And we create one right here. I've created a container called Music. And underneath there, when I click, I can see that I'm able to, again, get a list of all the blobs that are currently there. Right now there are some because I've uploaded them, normally there would not be any. And you'll see I could upload one or more blobs right from here just using a very simple process of going out and just grabbing the file or the folder that I want to upload. And I can simply do that right from here. And we'll just go grab something. And I will grab that, click there. And oh, whoops. All right, it's already there. Hold on one second. I forgot I grabbed the file that's already there. Let's do something a little bit different. And let's upload that one. And boom, we added a file in a blob and with no trouble. You could see it's just been added right at the top of the list right there. So it's easy to do from the portal. But I can do the same thing from this other tool. Let's minimize and go to our desktop for a minute. And what we can do is open up the Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer tool. Oops, let me get over... there we go. Get over there without it popping up the Start menu. And I've installed it recently so it's right at the top. It would be there alphabetically. Now, I downloaded this tool directly from the download center from Microsoft. You can browse and find it there. There's actually a link to it right from within the Azure portal. I'll show you where you can find the link right there. You get the most recent version. You download it and install it. And aside from occasionally giving feedback, once you configure it the first time and add your account information and connect it to your subscription, and I've done all that to avoid having to show you that on screen, we're able to go in. And what we see is that we do have, if we look over here, the ability to look at our local machine. I'm on a Windows 10 virtual machine that's running on top of my Windows 10 laptop. And I can see all the local and attached storage on this virtual machine as part of this tool. But I also see my ITPDemo1 subscription from Azure. I'm connected to the Azure fabric, looking at it, and I'm looking at the storage accounts. We can also see disks and all sorts of other stuff. But my storage account blob1234567 is right there. And I can open this up. Let's just get rid of this stuff down here. Open this up and as soon as it loads, it takes just a minute to connect so be patient with it while it does, but once it comes up, I'll see that I do have my blob containers. And I can open those up. And when I do that, let's just open that up, when I do that, I'm going to see my containers. There's the music container. And when we double click on that just to bring it up, it's going to load that list of all the files that we just saw right here. But look at all the tools up here. So it's just like Microsoft Office, right? I can upload, download, open, create a new folder, a new file. I can move things, delete, manage, do all sorts of stuff. And I can actually just right-click and have access to all those capabilities right here as well. So I could do everything right from within the interface. I don't necessarily need to go in. As you can see, I don't need to go in and be in the portal. I can do it all right from here. I have a nice little capability to see all the actions I can click on. I can highlight a document and I can look at information. I can even bring it up. If I want to double click and access it, I'll be able to grab a copy of it and interact with it if I choose to, and I'll be able to work with it. Do all sorts of stuff. It's a really cool little interface. You can see right there. It's just making me... giving me a prompt saying, ‘Hey, are you sure you want to open this?’ Sure enough, comes right up. If Excel is available as a CSV file, and it's available to me, I can work with it right from here. And I'm able to see evidence of what I just did by seeing a record of the fact that I brought it down and opened it up right there in real-time. Now I mentioned that we could see the link to get the software right from within the portal. So let's wrap up our conversation by taking a look at what I can do here. Let's go back up to the Overview area for my Blob Storage account right there. And notice just to the right of the actual name, sort of left of Delete, it says Open In Explorer. And if I click there and I don't already have the software, it's going to give me a link right there to download it. If I do, if I click that button that's on my machine, it's going to open right up and I'm off to the races. Using my Blob Storage account in Azure I'll be able to manage all that data. So we've talked about what it is, talked about why it's important. Now you see how easy it can be to use it, both in the Azure portal as well as using the downloadable Storage Explorer application that Microsoft provides. If you want to find out about this kind of Azure service or any other things having to do with Azure, or more broadly, almost anything at all, you can join me over at ITProTV at any time to continue this conversation and learn about all the new things we can show you how to do. We're always there, always willing to be able to spend time showing you how to get the most out of those investments you make with technology. But until either the next episode in our series, ‘What Is Azure?’ or the next time you join me over at ITProTV, I'm going to say goodbye. Wish you happy Azureing, and I'll see you soon.
