Get Some Personal Storage (Azure)

Posted on by Mike Denzien

This is step 2 of 7 of Hands-On Project 2 for Azure. In this step, you create a storage account that you can use as cloud-based personal storage, and learn to access your storage account with the Azure Storage Explorer client.

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Azure storage accounts are a service that provides different types of cloud storage for different use cases. Please watch this 15-minute introduction to get started:

Now, let’s retrace the steps shown in the video in your own account.

Create a Storage Account

Use the Azure Portal to create a storage account within your resource group.

  1. From the Azure Portal, please do the following:
  2. Navigate: Portal Home –> Storage Accounts –> Create
  3. Select a resource group. Use the resource group that you created to hold all the resources for these exercises.
  4. Enter a storage account name. In Azure, names of storage accounts must be globally unique, but the names are strictly limited – they can be only up to 24 characters long, and can contain only lower case letters and numbers and no special characters. So, the idea of using “domain name-like” names will not work.
  5. Select a region. In general you want all your resources to be in the same region so that you get the best performance. Choosing a region that is geographically close to you can be best. However, if you are using an Azure for Students account, you may later find that you can only create virtual machines in certain regions. (For now, US West 3 might be your best choice.)
  6. For Performance, standard will suffice.
  7. For Redundancy, choose locally-redundant storage (LRS). It is good enough for our purposes and the least expensive.
  8. For this exercise, you can take the defaults for all other options. To do so, click on Review, and then Create. Optionally, you can click through the remaining steps to explore the other available options.

Create a File Share

An Azure File Share supports access via an SMB file sharing client. SMB is a common protocol for sharing files on local area networks (LANs) for both Windows and Linux systems. If your internet service provider (ISP) allows the SMB protocol on the public internet (TCP, port 445), you could map a Windows drive letter to your file share, which would be very convenient indeed. However, many ISPs do not allow traffic on port 445 at all for security reasons. So, whether you can map a drive letter directly to your file share depends on which ISP you are using. If your ISP disallows SMB, you can still upload data to it through the Portal and Storage Explorer.

Let’s use the Azure Portal to create a file share within the storage account:

  1. From the Azure Portal, please do the following:
  2. Navigate: Portal Home –> Storage Accounts –> Select storage account –> File shares –> +File share.
  3. Enter a file share name. Like storage account names, file share names are limited. If you type in a name that contains a blank, the web page will display the rules to you.
  4. For Tier, select the Hot tier. It is likely cheaper and perfectly adequate for what we are doing.
  5. Click Create.

After creating the file share, simply click on the file share name and you will be taken to a page that allows you to upload, download, and more.

  1. Please do the following:
  2. Upload a few files using the Portal and get comfortable using it.

Create a Blob Container

On Azure, Blob Containers serve the same function as S3 Buckets in AWS: They are a general purpose object-based storage mechanism. For additional practice, let’s create a Blob container within your account:

  1. From the Azure Portal, please do the following:
  2. Navigate: Portal Home –> Storage Accounts –> Select storage account –> Containers –> +Container.
  3. Enter a container name. Container names are also limited. Type in a name that contains a blank, and the web page will display the rules to you.
  4. Leave Public access level at Private. This means that anyone accessing your Blob container must provide credentials, and you have total control over access.
  5. Click Create.

After creating the Blob container, simply click on the container name and you will be taken to a page that allows you to upload, download, and more.

  1. Please do the following:
  2. Upload a few files using the Portal and get comfortable using it.

Download and Install Azure Storage Explorer

The go-to method for accessing your storage accounts from your client computer is to use Storage Explorer, a Windows client program provided by Microsoft. You can download it from here:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/storage/storage-explorer/

Configure Storage Explorer to Access Your Storage Account

To connect Storage Explorer to your storage account, you need to provide appropriate credentials. There are several methods for doing this. We will use a connection string. Perform the following steps to complete this:

  1. From the Azure Portal, please do the following:
  2. Navigate: Portal Home –> Storage Accounts –> Select storage account –> Access Keys.
  3. Click Show for the connection string of key1. Copy the string to the clipboard.
  4. In Storage Explorer, on the left side under Emulator & Attached, select Storage Accounts.
  5. Navigate: At bottom-left, Connect to Azure Storage –> Storage account or service –> Connection String –>Next.
  6. Paste the connection string from the clipboard, then select Next.
  7. On the final screen, select Connect. This should add your storage account under Emulator & Attached | Storage Accounts.

Storage Explorer provides an intuitive user interface for uploading and downloading files. Select your file share and/or blob container within your storage account, then use the Upload and Download buttons as appropriate.