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With petabytes of capacity and massive scalability, Azure Blob storage easily and cost-effectively stores hundreds of objects, or hundreds of millions. You pay only for what you use, saving you more than on-premises storage options. It’s designed for applications that require performance, high availability, and security—offering both client-side encryption and server-side encryption.
Store any type of unstructured data—images, videos, audio, documents, and more—with a proven technology for Internet-scale applications. Blob storage already handles trillions of stored blobs with millions of average requests per second from customers including Xbox Live and its related services.
Blob storage accounts organize data storage based on how often your data is accessed—choose a hot storage tier for frequently accessed data and a cool storage tier for data you’ll rarely need. Both have similar latency and throughput, and are 100% API consistent without requiring any changes to your applications.
Backup and restore, archival, and disaster recovery scenarios tend to generate large datasets on a periodic basis and, due to business and compliance requirements, often need to be archived. Blob storage offers you a scalable, economical alternative to traditional backup storage for both short-term retrieval and long-term storage.
Blob storage is ideal for storing big data for analysis, whether using an Azure analytics service or your own on-premises solution. Blob storage also offers several benefits over the traditional Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) for big data scenarios—including geo-replication, lower storage costs, easier scalability, and data sharing outside of the Hadoop cluster.
The performance, scalability, and global availability of Blob storage make it ideal for storing and streaming media. NBC used Azure Media Services to stream more than 1,000 hours of video from the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games to millions of viewers—video that was stored in Azure blobs.
Perform common tasks with Blob storage using a variety of tools. PowerShell exposes the Azure Storage APIs. Azure Command-Line Interface provides a set of cross-platform commands for working with Azure Storage. The AzCopy command-line utility offers high-performance uploading, downloading, and copying of data to and from Azure Storage. And the Azure portal delivers a secure, flexible toolset for managing and monitoring Blob storage.
Storage provides rich client libraries for building apps—using .NET, Java, Android, C++, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and Python—and offer advanced capabilities such as retry logic, logging, and parallel uploads of large blobs. Data in Azure Storage is also accessible through a REST API, which can be called by any language that makes HTTP/HTTPS requests.
