Is Azure Cloud Service Local Storage encrypted?
I would like to utilize Local Storage for my worker role as a scratch disk for image manipulation. I'm currently using an encrypted Azure file share, but the performance isn't great. I'm concerned that if I start using Local Storage my data may not be encrypted at rest. I haven't been able to find definitive information about encryption and Local Storage.
Microsoft clearly allows blob and file services to encrypt data using Storage Service Encryption (SSE) and its trivial to enable this via the Azure Portal.
When configuring local storage in the cloud service definition I don't see any options related to encryption. There's also no mention of Local Storage in the Azure data at rest white paper.
It looks like Azure Disk Encryption supports encrypting both OS and data drives, but again, I didn't see any mention of Local Storage or PaaS in the Azure Disk Encryption page.
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Could someone please tell some examples where we can use Azure file share in azure instead of Azure Blobs. In the internet whenever I search I get it can be mounted or it follows SMB protocol. But still I am not understanding a single case where we can use Azure File share.
For this I tried to look into When to use Azure blob storage versus Azure file share?
-This is a similar question but doesn't answer my question.
Azure provides a variety of storage tools and services, including Azure Storage. To determine which Azure technology is best suited for your scenario, see Review your storage options in the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework.
For detailed information and examples refer to this article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-introduction
It depends mostly on your use-case and how you plan to access the data. If you simply want to mount and access your files Azure Files will be your best fit. If you are looking for the lowest cost and want to access your data programmatically through your application Azure Blob would be a better fit. Both are accessible through the portal or Azure Storage Explorer.
I also recommend this Learn module which covers the difference in data types and solutions.
Additional information: Azure Blob Storage vs Azure File Storage
Cost details of Azure Blob Storage pricing & Azure Files pricing
In short: if you ...
have an application that needs to store or access files in the cloud, use Blob Storage
need a file share that can be used by, for instance, a server, use File Shares
Azure Files shares can be mounted concurrently by cloud or on-premises deployments of Windows, Linux, and macOS. Azure Files shares can also be cached on Windows Servers with Azure File Sync for fast access near where the data is being used.
This means a File Share is, somewhat simplified, similar to a network share you would have in a local environment.
Azure Blob Storage helps you create data lakes for your analytics needs, and provides storage to build powerful cloud-native and mobile apps. Optimize costs with tiered storage for your long-term data, and flexibly scale up for high-performance computing and machine learning workloads.
This means Blob Storage is what you need when you're building powerful cloud-native and mobile apps.
I want to spike whether azure and the cloud is a good fit for us.
We have a website where users upload documents to our currently hosted website.
Every document has an equivalent record in a database.
I am using terraform to create the azure infrastructure.
What is my best way of migrating the documents from the local file path on the server to azure?
Should I be using file storage or blob storage. I am confused about the difference.
Is there anything in terraform that can help with this?
Based on your comments, I would recommend storing them in Blob Storage. This service is suited for storing and serving unstructured data like files and images. There are many other features like redundancy, archiving etc. that you may find useful in your scenario.
File Storage is more suitable in Lift-and-Shift kind of scenarios where you're moving an on-prem application to the cloud and the application writes data to either local or network attached disk.
You may also find this article useful: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-decide-blobs-files-disks
UPDATE
Regarding uploading files from local computer to Azure Storage, there are actually many options available:
Use a Storage Explorer like Microsoft's Storage Explorer.
Use AzCopy command-line tool.
Use Azure PowerShell Cmdlets.
Use Azure CLI.
Write your own code using any available Storage Client libraries or directly consuming REST API.
Need to store some content in Azure Blob Storage, and want to encrypt prior to storing it on Azure Blob (we don't want to rely on Azure storage encryption on-rest). The issue is we do not want to store our encryption keys on Azure (e.g. Key vault), and store it outside of Azure. Any suggestion on strategies for achieving this?
The issue is we do not want to store our encryption keys on Azure (e.g. Key vault), and store it outside of Azure.
Azure Storage Service Encryption doesn’t allow us to use our own encryption keys until now. To use your own encryption keys and store it outside of Azure, you need to create a proxy for your storage service.
For example, you could create a Web API to handle all the blob read/write requests. In your Web API, you could use your own encryption keys to encrypt or decrypt data and then write or read the data to Azure Blob Storage.
The limit of this way is that we can’t use the Azure Storage Client library or other tools to access the storage proxy (Web API) since it is written by yourself.
Any suggestion of on-premise secret options we can use, which are accessible to components on Azure.
I suggest you store the key on your local side and create a internal API which could return this key. To access this internal API from azure components, you could use hybrid connections.
Access on-premises resources using hybrid connections in Azure App Service
When working with a VHD hosted within an Azure Storage account, are there any operations one can perform to access the Storage account directly?
I.e. I create a VM and store it's VHD in a blob in account A, are there any local/efficient ways to work with data in account A from the VM?
See if Azure Storage Files service will work for you. You may attach your storage as a file share and communicate with that directly using traditional APIs.
Apart of that, you may use cross-platform Azure Storage Explorer for communicating with other Storage subservices like Blobs.
I have an on-premises mvc application with a database calls to one more server.
When I deploy this application to windows azure, I am curious to know what will be stored in the storage account for this cloud service?
Is it database records or something else?
Given you mentioned creating a Cloud Service (so, I'm assuming Web Role for your MVC app): The deployment needs a storage account, at a minimum, for storing diagnostic log information, as well as your cloud service package and configuration.
Storage account is mostly used for "Blob" storage. In Azure environment we should not prefer to store blob data( like image and doc/PDF ) in database.best practice to store blob storage link.
Azure Storage provides the flexibility to store and retrieve large amounts of unstructured data, such as documents and media files with Azure Blobs; structured nosql based data with Azure Tables; reliable messages with Azure Queues and use SMB based Azure Files for migrating on-premises applications to the cloud.
for Overview and reference : http://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/documentation/services/storage/