Makes it easier to move legacy applications to the cloud
Blob storage preferred for new applications
Can mount from an Azure virtual machine
Can mount on-premises with SMB 3.0
Works with Linux and Windows
Doesn't support Azure AD-based authentication or ACLs (Azure Storage account keys provide authentication and authorized access to the file share)
Each storage account can hold up to 500 TB (one subscription can have multiple storage accounts)
Storage accounts are organized into containers, which can have security applied to them and can contain blobs
Block blobs are optimized for streaming and storing cloud objects, up to 200 GB in size
Page blobs are optimized for representing PaaS disks and supporting random writes, up to 1 TB in size
Append blobs are optimized for append operations, up to 195 GB
Premium Storage provides faster IOPS through SSD storage
Storage account can contain any number of queues
Queue can contain any number of messages (until the storage account is full)
Queue messages are automatically deleted after seven days if not retrieved and deleted by an application
Messages may be up to 64 KB in size
Secured at storage account level
Queues are intended to pass control messages, not raw data
Best for semi-structured datasets
Typically lower cost than traditional SQL
Very fast if querying for key, slow if querying for value
Massively scalable; any amount of tables up to the limits of the storage account
Accessible through REST API, limited oData protocol, .NET
Values must be serialized