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Azure Blob Storage

Score9 out of 10

91 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Azure Blob Storage?

Microsoft's Blob Storage system on Azure is designed to make unstructured data available to customers anywhere through REST-based object storage.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Azure Blob Storage.
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Azure Blob as File Storage for TF and DMS system.

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it as file storage for our DMS solution, and the Terraform automation needs a container as state storage. So to speak, it addresses the crucial need for a reliable, cost-efficient, and reasonably fast storage. Both use cases have different needs (e.g., soft-delete options and locks to avoid conflicting changes), which are covered in the feature scope.

Pros

  • Offer configuration options e.g.: soft delete period, backups.
  • Price efficiency (compared to non object storage).
  • Availability (at least to my experience).

Cons

  • Sometimes the behavior is nondeterministic (e.g. compare config via UI vs. terraform).
  • While it does some things better than S3, the interoperability in a migration scenario seems cumbersome.
  • The number of features/config options is overwhelming; we found the docs, etc., a bit hard to read.

Return on Investment

  • Regarding the migration from S3, we needed significant investment just to get it running, which was negative.
  • Once it ran and we could configure the soft delete more fine-grained, it helped us and had a positive impact.
  • The fact that even more features/options are available, could help us in the future.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

IBM Cloud Object Storage, IBM Cloud Block Storage and Azure Files

Other Software Used

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), PostgreSQL, Microsoft Azure Key Vault

One stop storage solution for the all organization needs.

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Azure Blob Storage for various organisational needs, including storing documents, claim bills, backups, media, and archives. It's very convenient to use, easily accessible, and secure. These use cases are used by our various departments, making it a one-stop solution for most of our needs. As our business grows, we will have more such use cases in the future that can leverage Azure Blob storage.

Pros

  • Media storage like training video, claim bills etc.
  • Database, application backups.
  • Data Archiving.

Cons

  • Still need better API capabilities, such as querying data in storage, and stronger rate limiting.
  • Still lacks object-level access control to have granular access over each object.
  • Need to have better API integration with third party applications.

Return on Investment

  • Azure Blob has reduced our overall infrastructure cost.
  • With Azure Blob Storage, we don't need dedicated personnel to maintain storage and its related infrastructure.
  • Azure Blob Storage provides a one-stop storage solution for most of our business needs, allowing us to focus solely on the business.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Wasabi Object Storage, Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and Cloudian HyperStore

Other Software Used

Wasabi Object Storage, Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, Cloudian HyperStore

Azure Blob Storage as an excellent alternative to Amazon S3

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It's used to store mostly images uploaded in an ERP software, this software use those files to generate reports as evidence/proof of work. Also we integrate Azure Blob Storage with our kubernetes cluster to persist data used by our pods/containers. Also we upload some internal backups to Azure Blob Storage to serve as a secondary backup location.

Pros

  • Easy implementation with our java projects.
  • Easy integration with our python projects.
  • Easy integration with kubernetes

Cons

  • Statistics ready available of usage within my containers
  • Faster gathering of usage when i click directory statistics
  • Better documentation for queues

Return on Investment

  • Better perfomance of our ERP, we used to serve the files directly from another internal system.

Usability

Other Software Used

DigitalOcean Spaces, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Talos OS

Blob storage for central control.

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Blob storage to share large files and public marketing material. Using blob storage is very easy; the access settings allow you to make files public so that anyone with the URL can access them, or they can be set as private and restricted. Using Blob storage allows us to keep control of the files at the source rather than leaving our estate as with external file-sharing systems. Using a vanity URL allows the link to look more user-friendly/professional.

Pros

  • Hosting large files.
  • Vanity URLs.
  • Temporary access.
  • Different levels of access to files.

Cons

  • Enumeration of folders is not possible.
  • Spaces in file names can be problematic.

Return on Investment

  • Meant that we did not need to seek a 3rd party alternative.
  • Central control of file storage and file hosting.
  • That staff come to IT rather than seek alternative products.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

OneDrive, Dropbox, FileShare, ShareFile and WeSend

Azure Blob Storage - It's worth using in your environment

Incentivized
Michael Ward
Sr Systems Administrator in Information Technology at USI (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Tiering - Hot/Cold/Archive.
  • It allows you to pay for the performance you need for the task at hand.
  • Easily consumed and accessed.

Cons

  • Expensive to egress your data, especially in a true DR scenario from cold or archive tier.

Return on Investment

  • Azure has increased the flexibility of where we place data within our organization.
  • It has proven to be very reliable and always accessible.