MS Azure Beginner: Storage Accounts and Networking

Name: MS Azure Beginner: Storage Accounts and Networking
Author: Steven Burnley

Learn about storage accounts, how to manage virtual networks, and how to connect networks using Peering.

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Course: On-Demand

In this lesson, we're going to go into detail on the Azure storage accounts specifically how to use the file shares and the blob container storage that's supported. In order to navigate to the storage accounts, we have three options. The icon may be presented to you at the top of the screen when you're most frequently used resources. You can see storage accounts listed here on my menu. Another option for accessing storage accounts would be to search for it in the menu system using the search box at the top or use the hamburger menu on the left hand side of the screen to navigate to your storage accounts. And you can see we have several storage accounts created in this subscription. Let's click on one of 'em to go in in more detail. Specifically, we want to review the four types of data that can be stored in a storage account and then discuss how to configure both the containers and the file shares. So in the configuration of the storage account, you can see listed under data storage, that there are the four resource types, let's cover containers first. There are actually two popular uses for container storage. One of them would be to store files used by your public website. For example, we could wanna store images that could be displayed as part of our website. If that's true, we would want to configure the access level to a public access level so that users could access those resources directly or browse the entire container, and that's what we will leave it to and we'll click create. Now we would be able to navigate to the images folder and upload assets here to be used by our web application. Let's try that, let's upload an image now. If we click the upload button, we could then select a file from our local machine. Now that we have created a container called images, let's upload a file. You can see there's an upload button in the menu system, I'm going to click that and select a picture from my local computer. Now that I have the file selected, I can click the upload button. Now this picture of a sunset could be used on my website. Let's see how. If I click on the sunset.jpeg photo, I'll notice over on the right hand side, there is now a URL associated with that. The URL is the universal resource location and it is like a website link. If I click this and then paste this into my web browser, you can see that the image that I just added can now be accessed using a public URL. This is how images can be uploaded to containers and then integrated into your existing websites. The advantage of putting your images in a container storage is that it is a very affordable storage and can be used by many different resources in this public way. Another popular use of containers would be not for public resources like images in your website, but would instead be private storage locations such as database backups. The advantage of storing database backups and other backup files in the cloud is that it is outside your corporate network and therefore, it's protected in case of a problem at your local physical location. If I click container here, let's create a location up in the cloud for us to store things like backups. Now that I've typed in an appropriate name, we can determine what sort of access level we want. When we created the images folder to be used by public web applications, we set the access level to public access to blobs or containers. But in this case, we're storing backup files and we want them to be very limited in terms of their access. So we're gonna set the public access level to none. Therefore, no one will have access to these files unless they can log in to the Azure portal. I'm gonna click the create button, and you can see now we have a very different container from the one we created a moment ago. Instead of it being public access to the container like those images for the website, it's now a private container meaning only administrators will be able to access this file location. This is also a good idea for restoring backups here because blob container storage is very affordable and this is a nice cheap way for you to store large volumes of information outside your network and protect it up in the cloud. One of the things you'll notice when you click on one of your storage locations is the ability for you to control properties associated with that. This includes the URL that's been created associated with this location and this is information that can be shared in this case with other administrators on your network when they want to access this particular protected location. Because you might be storing things like backups in your blob containers, you may not use them very often. In a perfect environment, you would not ever need your backups. Hopefully, you will never have to go down and restore. So one of the things that you can do in Azure Blob container management is flag files as long-term archive storage by identifying some files as long-term storage in Azure, Microsoft will actually reduce your costs for these archive files, assuming that you will not access them on a regular basis. These are called the tiers of storage in a blob container. In order to configure this blob cost savings, we'll enter in a rule that says, move to cool. This is not actually going to move the files, instead it's gonna apply a rule to them that is gonna change them to a different type of file storage called cool. We will say, last modified more than say, 90 days ago. If we don't touch the files for 90 days, rather than deleting them, you'll see there's an option to move them to cool storage or archive storage. Just to remind you, this will not actually move the files to a new location. Instead, it will flag these files as either being cool or archive instead of hot. Hot is the default. Cool implies that you are not going to access these files very often and therefore you want to save on your dist cost expenses for that. When you flag things as cool, your costs drop dramatically allowing you to retain files for years with very low cost. The cheapest form of storage is actually archive storage instead of cool. But for archive, there is actually a financial penalty every time you access the files. It is a recommendation to only flag files as archive storage if you plan to not access them because they do have to be restored by Microsoft in order for you to get to them, and that can take a few minutes of extra time. So just to summarize this idea, this is about storage tiers within blob storage. The default is the hot tier. You can create rules to flag files as cool or archive in order to save money on the monthly expenses for storing them, understanding that there will be financial penalties if those files are ever retrieved. While penalties don't sound like a good idea, if you're never going to access the files such as long-term backup retention and you're only keeping them for compliance purposes, this is the most affordable way free to store files for a long period of time. Just to review, when we're looking at a storage account, we control these rules for flagging files as cool or archived tier through the lifecycle management menu item. The only other thing that we would like to cover in this video is the idea of file shares. File shares are the third way to store files in a storage account, and they are meant to emulate traditional file shares in a corporate network by creating a file share for people to store things like spreadsheets. We can now provide a remote storage location that is not located in our data center anymore. This storage location is now only accessible up in the cloud. In order to make it convenient for users to access these files, there are actually built-in scripts that can be run on users' works stations that will help assign a drive letter like we would see in a normal network. So for example, we could run a script that would assign the letter S on people's local computers to the spreadsheet location up in the cloud. When users want to save or retrieve files to the S drive, those requests will be redirected and stored up in Azure. This is a PowerShell script that could be executed when users log into their workstations or as part of the startup process for the machine. Stay tuned for the next lesson where I'll show you the other two parts of storage accounts, specifically cues and table storage. Thanks for watching.

Beginner Provider : Steven Burnley 5 Lessons · 42m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese

Course Description

These lessons will show you the storage options in a Microsoft Azure subscription. This will include an overview of file shares, blob containers, queues, and tables. You will also learn the fundamentals of Azure Networking, including the setup of virtual networks and subnets and the ability to enable internetwork communication using Peering.

Topics address using file shares for sharing files to Windows, Linux, and Mac clients as well as how to configure the user’s workstation to access the shares and permission management. You will also explore the blob containers and common use cases for implementing containers, along with understanding how blob storage tiers can save money by identifying files that can be marked for long-term storage. You will learn about how software developers use Queues and Tables in the storage accounts for the storage of web application data or passing information between applications. Following this, you will delve into virtual networks and how these are related to traditional IP addresses. You will gain insight on how to select the appropriate IP addresses, how to break up a virtual network into subnets, and how to secure your networks using network security groups. Additionally, topics will include how to create the inbound and outbound rules to limit traffic by IP address and/or port number, internetworking and how this can be enabled for your virtual networks through Peering. Finally, these lessons will cover the establishment of a Peering relationship between two virtual networks and viewing the corresponding return Peering relationship that will be created in the peered network.

What You'll Learn

Explore the file storage options available in an Azure subscription, including file shares, blob containers, queues, and tables
Identify common use cases for the four types of file storage in Azure storage accounts
Configure file shares for Windows, Linux, and Mac clients, including workstation access and permission management
Set up Azure virtual networks and subnets, and select appropriate IP addresses
Secure networks using network security groups with inbound and outbound rules that limit traffic by IP address and/or port number
Enable internetwork communication between virtual networks using Peering

Key Takeaways

Azure storage accounts provide file shares, blob containers, queues, and tables as storage options.
Blob storage tiers can save money by identifying files that can be marked for long-term storage.
Software developers use queues and tables in storage accounts to store web application data or pass information between applications.
Virtual networks relate to traditional IP addresses and can be broken up into subnets and secured with network security groups.
Establishing a Peering relationship between two virtual networks automatically creates a corresponding return Peering relationship in the peered network.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does this Azure beginner course cover?

It covers the storage options in a Microsoft Azure subscription (file shares, blob containers, queues, and tables) and the fundamentals of Azure networking, including setting up virtual networks and subnets, securing networks with network security groups, and enabling internetwork communication using Peering.

What topics are included in the storage portion?

It covers using file shares to share files with Windows, Linux, and Mac clients and configuring workstation access and permissions, blob containers and their common use cases, how blob storage tiers can save money through long-term storage, and how developers use queues and tables for web application data or passing information between applications.

What networking skills will I gain?

You will learn how virtual networks relate to traditional IP addresses, how to select appropriate IP addresses, how to break a virtual network into subnets, how to secure networks with network security groups using inbound and outbound rules that limit traffic by IP address and/or port number, and how to establish Peering between two virtual networks.

What lessons make up this course?

The lessons are: Containers and File Shares; Queues and Tables; Virtual Networks and Subnets; Network Security Groups; and Subnet Peering and VPNs.

What skills and certifications does this course relate to?

It relates to Azure Blob Storage, Azure Cloud Services, Microsoft Azure, and Network Storage, and to the Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Fundamentals and Microsoft Certified: Azure Network Engineer Associate certifications.