An introduction to Microsoft Azure Storage

Storage has always been one of the most important cornerstones of every system. You cannot imagine a virtual machine (VM), web application, or mobile application running without any sort of dependency on storage, and that is what we will cover throughout this book, but from the perspective of the cloud generally, and Azure specifically.

Microsoft Azure Storage is the bedrock of Microsoft's core storage solution offering in Azure. No matter what solution you are building for the cloud, you'll find a compelling use for Azure Storage.

Microsoft Azure Storage is not just a traditional storage system; it's scalable and can store up to hundreds of terabytes of data, meaning that it fits almost every scenario you can ever imagine in many fields, such as IT, science, medical fields, and so on.

At the time of writing, Microsoft Azure is generally available in 36 regions, with plans announced for six additional regions, as shown in the following figure:

This global presence means you can host your storage in the nearest region and access it from anywhere in the world. Considering that Microsoft continues to build new data centers in new regions, the latency between you and your services in Azure will decrease.