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Azure Blob Storage

Score8.7 out of 10

122 Reviews and Ratings

What is Azure Blob Storage?

Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft Azure’s object storage service for storing and accessing large volumes of unstructured data. Organizations use it for application content, backups and archives, media, logs, data exports, machine learning datasets, high-performance computing workloads, and data-lake storage. NOTE: Azure Data Lake Storage, also known as Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, is not a separate service or account type. It is a set of big-data analytics capabilities within Azure Blob Storage that organizations enable through the hierarchical namespace setting.

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Categories & Use Cases

Who Buys & Uses Azure Blob Storage, with Azure Data Lake Storage

Azure Blob Storage 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)

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)

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)

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)

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 Data Lake : A wonderful Scalable Cloud Storage Solution for all your Big Data Needs

Incentivized
Abhishek KataraView profile
Technical Lead in Information Technology at Tata Consultancy Services (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Stored Terabytes of Healthcare data in a cost-optimized solution on-cloud using Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 in containerized fashion. We utilized Azure Data Lake Storage containers as a Destination in our Data Engineering Streasmets Pipelines. Loaded Data became available further to multiple downstream applications in an automated and faster way using Azure Data Factory. Also turned out a better, cost-optimized, and faster solution than HDFS for our different business use cases like the migration of huge data from RDBMS to Data Lake.

Pros

  • Setting up Azure Data Lake Storage account, container is quite easy
  • Access from anywhere and easy maintenance
  • Integration with Azure Data Factory service for end to end pipeline is pretty easy
  • Can store Any form of data (Structured, Unstructured, Semi) in faster manner

Cons

  • UI search feature can certainly be improvised e.g. inclusion of wildcards to search a particular file in container
  • Sometimes gets Hanged/lagged while monitoring
  • Probably the new UI feature can address above issues.

Most Important Features

  • Smooth Integration with other Azure Services i.e. Azure Databricks, Data factory, synapse, etc.
  • Easy to access and Manage, Less maintenance required in comparison to traditional storage solutions
  • Hadoop FIle System compatibility

Return on Investment

  • Data Migration projects from relational sources to Azure Data Lake Storage have given a great ROI, thanks to the less running costs, and High availability
  • Pretty easy to work with in terms of Managing and accessing Data in containerized fashion.
  • Further features like Archival of data which is accessed less frequently can significantly reduce cost

Alternatives Considered

Apache Hadoop and Google Cloud Storage

Other Software Used

Apache Kafka, Apache Hive, Apache Spark