How to Create Microsoft Azure Storage Account in 2022

Microsoft Azure storage account contains all your Azure Storage data objects: blobs, files, queues, tables, and disks. The cloud storage account provides a unique namespace for your Azure Storage data that is available from anywhere globally over HTTP or HTTPS network. As a result, data in the Azure storage account is enduring and highly accessible, secure, and scalable. Before deep dive, let’s understand what cloud storage in general is.

What is Cloud Storage

Cloud storage is the cloud computing model that stores data on the Internet through the cloud computing provider who manages and operates the data storage as a service. It’s delivered on-demand with just-in-time capacity and costs and eliminates buying and managing your own data storage infrastructure. It gives you the ability, global scale, and durability with “anytime, anywhere” data access.

For example, Netflix uses AWS S3 storage service to deliver content to its users.

Cloud storage is purchased from the third-party cloud vendor who owns and operates the data storage capacity and delivers it over the Internet in a pay-as-you-go model. These cloud storage vendors manageability, durability, and security to make data accessible to your applications all around the globe.

Apps access cloud storage through traditional storage protocols or directly via the API. In addition, many vendors offer complementary services designed to help collect, secure, analyze, and manage data on a massive scale.

Types of Cloud Storage

There are mainly three types of cloud data storage: object storage, file storage, and block storage. Each offers its advantages and have their use cases:

1. Object Storage – Azure Storage provides a massively scalable object store for data objects, file system service for the cloud, messaging store for reliable messaging, and a NoSQL store. Azure Storage is: Durable and highly available. Redundancy assures that your data is safe in transient hardware failures.
2. File Storage – Many existing applications access data using file-based APIs and are designed to share data using SMB file shares. Azure File Storage allows you to migrate your on-premises file or file share-based apps to Azure without providing or managing the highly-available file server VMs.
3. Block Storage – Other business applications like databases or ERP systems often require dedicated, low latency storage for each host. This is comparable to direct-attached storage (DAS) or the Storage Area Network (SAN). Block-based cloud storage solutions like Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) are provisioned with each virtual server and offer the ultra-low latency needed for high-performance workloads.

Azure Storage services

Azure Storage includes these data services:

1. Azure Blobs is a massively scalable object store for text and binary data.
2. Azure Files: It is managed file shares for cloud or on-premises deployments.
3. Azure Queues: A messaging store for reliable messaging between application components.
4. Azure Tables: It is a NoSQL store for schemaless structured data storage.

Each service is accessed through the storage account.

How to create an Azure storage account

Every storage account must belong to the Azure resource group. The resource group is the logical container for grouping your Azure services. When you create the storage account, you can either create the new resource group or use the existing resource group. This article shows how to create a new resource group.

We will create a General Purpose v1 account in this tutorial.

Step 1

On the Azure portal menu, select All services. In the list of resources, type the Storage Accounts. As you begin typing, list filters based on your input. Select the Storage Accounts.

Step 2

On the Storage Accounts window that appears, select Add.

You will see the following screen.

I am using a free trial as a Subscription tier. You may have to use a Pay-as-you-go service.

I have already created my Resource Group AzureTraining, but if you don’t have created it, you can create it by clicking Create a new link.

Then I have created the account name: coronastorage; you can choose the name whatever you want, but write all the letters in lower cases, and the name must be unique. The name must be between 3 and 24 characters in length and can include numbers and letters only.

Step 3

Now, see the following screenshot.

Select the location for your storage account, or use a default location.

Performace should be Standard as this is just a basic tutorial for learning, but Microsoft recommends Premium.

Select Review + Create to review your storage account settings and create an account.

In the final step, please select Create.

After a few minutes, it will deploy the service.

Now, Go to your ResourceGroup, and you will see your storage name, and in my case, it is a coronastorage.

Here, if you confirm the delete by providing the storage account name, it will permanently delete the whole data.