This is one in a series of posts on a Windows Azure Learning Plan. You can find the main post here. This one deals with Storage for  Windows Azure.

 

Overview

Overview and general  information about Windows Azure Storage - what it is, how it works, and where you can learn more.

General Overview Whitepaper (registration of a screen name, but free)

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/understanding-data-storage-offerings

Official Microsoft Site on Azure Storage

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee924681.aspx

Scalability Targets for Azure Storage

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2010/05/10/windows-azure-storage-abstractions-and-their-scalability-targets.aspx

Understanding Azure Storage by using the API

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/paolos/archive/2011/02/21/yet-another-application-to-handle-windows-azure-storage-services.aspx

Blobs

Blob Storage is a binary-level "container" that can hold one or more streams of data.

Understanding Block Blobs and Page Blobs

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee691964.aspx

Blob Service Concepts

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd179376.aspx

Tables

Tables are key-value-pair type storage, and can be in the terabyte range of size.

Understanding the Table Storage Data Model

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd179338.aspx

Table Service Concepts

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd179463.aspx

Querying Tables and Entities

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd894031.aspx

Queues

Queues are actually more table storage - but specifically designed to allow Web and Worker Roles to communicate.

Queue Service Concepts

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd179353.aspx

Queue Service API

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd179363.aspx

Azure Drive

An Azure Drive isn't something you mount over the web (although that's possible to do with a little code) - it's a "local" NTFS drive for Windows Azure Applications.

Windows Azure Drives white paper

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9710117

Content Delivery Network

An "Edge" network of storage that buffers after the first use by a client.

General Overview

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2009/11/05/introducing-the-windows-azure-content-delivery-network.aspx

Delivering High-Bandwidth Content with the Windows Azure CDN

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee795176.aspx

Tools and Utilities

Free and not-free tools to work with Azure Storage.

Storage SDK

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.windowsazure.storageclient.aspx

Benchmarks and Throughput tests

http://azurescope.cloudapp.net/BenchmarkTestCases/

Mount an Azure Drive as an NTFS Drive

http://azurescope.cloudapp.net/CodeSamples/cs/792ce345-256b-4230-a62f-903f79c63a67/

Command-line and other tools for working with Azure Storage

http://tinyurl.com/2acx6d8 and http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2010/04/17/windows-azure-storage-explorers.aspx