Seven features of Windows Azure storage Service

Built on the Windows Azure Cloud computing platform, Windows Azure Data Storage service leverages the advantages of Windows Azure cloud computing platform with the following features:

(1) High security

Users can customize the security level of the data, such as public or private data. Public data can be accessed by anyone, but users of private data must be authorized and authenticated to access it. Authorization and authentication are achieved by accessing the key, and only the person with access to the key can access the private data.

(2) High performance

Windows Azure Storage Services greatly accelerates data access through decentralized data storage and dynamic load balancing. If the traffic is large, the system automatically transfers the user request to a server with a small number of accesses. If all the servers have a large amount of traffic, the system will automatically partition the data or automatically increase the server, so that the performance of data access will not be reduced because of the increase in traffic. Instead of the traditional data storage system, the data access time increases with the increase of user traffic.

(3) Mass storage

Each data store account can store up to 100TB of data, and each subscription account can have a 1~5 data storage account, that is, each subscription account can store large to 500TB of data. If you need more storage space, users can make special requests.

(4) High availability

Windows Azure ensures high availability of data by storing data in replication. Each data is saved at least 3 times, so the loss or error of one copy does not affect the availability of the entire data. So users don't have to worry about data loss or the inability to access data because the server that holds the data is down.

(5) can be accessed anytime, anywhere

Each data stored in the Windows Azure Storage service has a URL locator, Windows Azure applications can be accessed from within the datacenter, and local applications can access from within the enterprise using RESTful interfaces, Users can even access data by running applications on mobile devices.

(6) Elastic telescopic

One of the biggest advantages of Windows Azure data storage services is on-demand, paid for by use. Users can increase or decrease the amount of storage space needed according to the actual data storage and user access, so that the lack or waste of data memory is not caused by the constant change of user's traffic.

(7) supports a variety of data storage types

The Windows Azure Storage service currently supports several types of data storage:

1, sophomore object (BLOB): It for the storage of unstructured data files, such as documents, images and image files.

2, table (table): It for the storage of structured data, such as commodity information including commodity names, prices, inventory and so on. Although it is very similar to a table in use on tables and relational databases, it is not a relational table. The data contained in the table is a series of entity records with attributes. Tables do not have a fixed schema, so each entity record can have different properties, and its properties can be of multiple data types, such as int, string, bool, or DateTime. An application can access data in a table using a simple query language defined by OData. Tables can store large to hundreds of millions of entity records or too-byte (terabyte) data.

3. Message Queuing (queue): It is primarily for asynchronous communication between Web role and worker role. For example, a user commits a task that requires a lot of computing through web role, where the role of web roles first writes information about how to complete the task into the message queue, and then the worker role that runs in the background can take that information from the message queue and process it. This loosely coupled structure greatly improves the overall processing performance of the application and is easy to scale.

4. Drive (xDrive): Its primary role is to provide an NTFS file volume for Windows Azure applications that can access stored data through standard NTFS APIs. By means of drive storage, we can migrate existing applications that use the NTFS file system and standard I/O libraries more smoothly to Windows Azure.