Azure – How to create and use an Azure Storage account

Azure Storage is the managed cloud storage service offered in Microsoft Azure. Azure Storage provides a highly available, durable, scalable, and redundant storage service. Azure Storage platform includes data services like Azure Blobs, Azure Files, Azure Queues, Azure Tables, and Azure Disks. You can read more about Azure Storage at this blog post Azure – Understanding Azure Storage

To access any of these services from an application, you have to create an Azure Storage Account. The storage account provides a unique namespace for your Azure Storage data that is accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. An Azure storage account contains all of your Azure Storage data objects: blobs, files, queues, tables, and disks.

Creating a storage account

You can create an Azure storage account using the Azure portal, Azure PowerShell, or Azure CLI. Let us look at how to create an Azure Storage account using Azure Portal.

1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
2. In the home Screen of Azure portal, select Create a resource.
3. In the selection panel that appears, select Storage.
4. On the right side of that pane, select Storage account.

 

You are now on the Create storage account page which has multiple tabs like Basic, Networking, Advanced, Tags, Review + Create, etc. Lets now look at each of these tabs.

 

Configure the Basic options

1. Select the Subscription you want to use from the Drop-down list
2. Select an existing Resource group from the Drop-down list or click ‘Create new’ to create a new one.
3. Enter a Storage account name. The name must be unique across all existing storage account names in Azure. Names must be 3 to 24 characters long and can contain only lowercase letters and numbers. This name will be used to generate the public URL used to access the data in the account.
4. Select a Location near to you from the Drop-down list.
5. The performance option decides the type of disk storage used to hold the data in the Storage account. Standard uses traditional hard disks, and Premium uses solid-state drives (SSD) for faster access. Let us select Standard for the Performance option.
6. Select StorageV2 (general purpose v2) for the Account kind. You can read more about various Azure Storage Account Types here at this blog post.
7. Select Locally-redundant storage (LRS) for the Replication option. This option lets you choose how far away the replication occurs to match your durability requirements. Data in Azure storage accounts are always replicated to ensure high availability
8. Set the Access tier to Hot.  The Hot Access Tier is suitable for frequently accessed data, and the Cool Access Tier suits better for infrequently accessed data. This setting is only used for Blob storage and this only sets the default value. When you create a Blob, you can set a different value for Access tier.
9. Click the Next: Networking > button to move to the Networking tab, or select the Networking tab at the top of the screen.

Configure the Networking options

1. Select a Connectivity method as per your requirement. If you select Public Network (All networks), your storage will be available to all the networks including the internet.
2. Click the Next: Advanced > button to move to the Advanced tab, or select the Advanced tab at the top of the screen.

Configure the Advanced options

1. Set Secure transfer required to Enabled. The secure transfer option enhances the security of your storage account by only allowing requests by a secure connection. Setting this option to Enabled will force all clients to use SSL (HTTPS). Using HTTPS over the network is considered a best practice.
2. Set Large file shares to Disabled. Enable this option if you want file share support up to a maximum of 100 TiB.
3. Set Blob Soft delete option set to Disabled. Soft delete lets you recover your blob data in case your blobs or blob snapshots are deleted accidentally/overwritten.
4. Leave the Data Lake Storage Gen2 option as Disabled. This setting is for big-data applications which is not relevant to this blog post.
5. Click the Next: Tags > button to move to the Tags tab, or select the Tags tab at the top of the screen.

Configure the Tags options

1. Tags section allows you to associate or categorize resources using name/value pairs. You can explore this setting if you want.

Review + Create

1. Click Review + create to review the settings we selected. Here Azure will do a quick validation of your choices to make sure all the required fields are selected. If there are any issues, those issues will be reported in this tab and you can make necessary changes.
2. Once you’ve reviewed the settings, click Create button to create the storage account.

It will take a few minutes to deploy the Storage account.

Verify the Storage Account created

Once the deployment is completed, let us check the Storage account created.

1. Select Home and click the Resource groups. This will list all the Resource groups available. Select the Resource group where we created our Storage Account
2. Locate the new storage account in the list of Resources available under the Resource group and verify if the Storage account creation is as expected.

This is the process flow for creating a Storage account. Please note that Microsoft keeps on enhancing the Azure portal. So the screens may look a little different than those in the screenshots.