Windows Azure Storage Abstractions and their Scalability
Targets

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Windows Azure Storage

10 May 2010 2:41 PM

• Comments 6

The four object abstractions Windows Azure Storage provides for application
developers are:

• Blobs – Provides a simple interface for storing named files along
  with metadata for the file.
• Tables – Provides massively scalable structured storage. A Table is a
  set of entities, which contain a set of properties. An application can
  manipulate the entities and query over any of the properties stored in a Table.
• Queues – Provide reliable storage and delivery of messages for an
  application to build loosely coupled and scalable workflow between the different
  parts (roles) of your application.
• Drives – Provides durable NTFS volumes for Windows Azure applications
  to use. This allows applications to use existing NTFS APIs to access a network
  attached durable drive. Each drive is a network attached Page Blob formatted as
  a single volume NTFS VHD. In this post, we do not focus on drives, since their
  scalability is that of a single blob.

The following shows the Windows Azure Storage abstractions and the Uris used
for Blobs, Tables and Queues. In this post we will (a) go through each of these
concepts, (b) describe how they are partitioned (c) and then talk about the
scalability targets for these storage abstractions.

Is not new, but it is very well done!