Azure Storage underpins most data services on the platform. Azure Blob Storage is optimized for massive amounts of unstructured object data such as images, videos, audio, and backups. A single block blob can reach approximately 4.75 terabytes, and customers choose between Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive tiers to balance storage cost against access frequency. The Archive tier offers the lowest storage price but introduces retrieval costs measured in hours and suits data that must be retained long-term, such as compliance backups. Azure Files delivers fully managed file shares accessible via the Server Message Block (SMB) or Network File System (NFS) protocols, making it useful for lifting file-server workloads to the cloud. Azure Queue Storage provides asynchronous messaging between application components with messages up to 64 kilobytes in size, and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 adds a hierarchical namespace and POSIX-compliant access control on top of Blob Storage for big data analytics.
Storage redundancy options protect against data loss within and across regions. Locally redundant storage replicates data within a single datacenter, zone-redundant storage spans Availability Zones within a region, and geo-redundant storage (GRS) replicates asynchronously to a paired secondary region hundreds of miles away for cross-regional disaster recovery. Object replication asynchronously copies blobs between storage accounts for scenarios such as data localization, latency reduction, and disaster recovery. Managed disks for virtual machines support sizes up to 64 tebibytes on Premium SSD and Ultra Disk offerings.
Azure's database portfolio spans relational and NoSQL workloads. Azure SQL Database is a fully managed platform-as-a-service relational database with built-in high availability, automatic backups, and intelligent performance tuning. Azure SQL Managed Instance offers near-complete compatibility with on-premises SQL Server for lift-and-shift migrations, while SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines provides infrastructure-as-a-service control for legacy applications. For open-source engines, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB deliver managed services. Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model NoSQL database that offers turnkey global distribution, multi-region writes, five tunable consistency levels, and guaranteed single-digit-millisecond latency at the 99th percentile across APIs including SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Gremlin, and Table.
Analytics and integration are addressed by Azure Synapse Analytics, which combines enterprise data warehousing, Spark-based data lake analytics, and data integration pipelines; Azure Data Factory, a fully managed data integration service with more than ninety built-in connectors for orchestrating ETL at scale; and Azure HDInsight, which provides managed clusters for open-source frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark, Kafka, and HBase.