Instructor: So as you can see,

about 1/5 of this exam

says "Implement and manage storage."

There are three sub-objectives underneath that,

including configuring access to storage,

configuring storage accounts,

and Azure files and Azure blobs.

So in this section of the course,

we're gonna talk about storage.

Now, despite only being worth

around 1/5 of the exam score,

it's actually a pretty big topic.

We do really need to get into a lot of the nitty-gritty

when it comes to Azure storage accounts.

In my view, a storage account

is one of the three fundamental services

in infrastructure as a service.

The other two being virtual machines and networking.

So let's go to the Azure portal,

and let's look at the process

of creating a storage account.

So I'm going to say Create a resource.

And right off the Get Started tab,

storage account is one of the more popular resources,

or I could always go to the Storage category

and say Create.

Now, over the years,

this interface has changed slightly from time to time.

We have at the current time

six tabs of the wizard

plus the Review and Create tab.

Like any resource in Azure,

you must select a subscription,

and you must select a resource group

for this resource to live.

You also must give the storage account a name.

As it says in the tool tip,

the name must be unique

across all existing storage account names in Azure.

And so as a result,

you might have to get fairly detailed

when it comes to naming it

given that there are millions of storage accounts

across all of Azure.

Now, as most resources,

we have to pick a region of the world

to deploy it to,

and I've got the default here,

which for me is East US.

It could be different for you,

I'm just gonna leave it in the East US region.

Now, the region that you choose

could be important for a couple of important reasons.

One is going to be pricing.

The region that you choose

is directly related to how much you're going to pay.

As you can see, there is a price of 2.1 cents per gigabyte

for the first 50 terabytes in this East US region.

If I was to choose a different region, such as UK,

it's actually cheaper,

1.9 cents per gigabyte.

So the region of the world actually does affect pricing.

Second thing is you want your data

to live close as possible to the places

where you use the data.

So if you have your apps

and your virtual machines in one region,

and they access that data in a storage account,

you may want your storage accounts

to be in the same region.

Third, you may have various data residency requirements

that you have to live by.

So again, different countries

and different regions are gonna have laws

where data must be stored for their citizens.

And so if you are, for instance, a European citizen

and you're storing the private data of European citizens,

then perhaps you may have to store that data

in the region of Europe.

So you're gonna choose region

based on a number of different factors.

Oh, finally, there might be various features

that are only available to certain regions.

Microsoft does have the tendency

to roll out new types of things

to one region before another

so that they can be tested out.

So if you are dependent on a new feature

that is just being released,

you may have to choose a region for that.

One of the new changes to the UI

is to select your primary service.

Now, the most normal one is called blob storage.

Data lake storage is a special type of storage

that's for extremely large amounts of data

using big data-type workloads,

but blob storage is gonna be the most normal selection.

If you need files or you need something else,

tables or queues,

you would choose a different option for this.

Continuing on this page,

this is gonna be one of the first options that we have

having to do with speed and latency

in terms of access.

So if we were to choose a premium account,

as you can see, it's got recommended

for low-latency scenarios.

Now, the premium account has a much higher

per gigabyte charge per month,

as well as a lower access charge.

So it's gonna be, let's say, 2/10 of a cent

for 10,000 read operations

versus 6/10 of a cent under normal hot access.

So premium access is more expensive per month per gigabyte,

but cheaper to read from.

So that's just one of these decisions

that we're gonna make right off the top here.

So we're just gonna stick with a standard storage account.

Now, we do need to talk about the concept of redundancy.

So I'll pause the video here,

and in the next video, we'll talk about these options

for how your data is stored and protected

in case of failures.