How to Choose Your Data Storage in the Cloud
Azure, like other clouds, offers a wide range of storage devices. The simplest approach is to define a scalable set of virtual machines hosted in the cloud where we can implement our custom solutions. For instance, we can create a SQL Server cluster on our cloud-hosted virtual machines to increase reliability and computational power. However, usually, custom architectures are not the optimal solution and do not take full advantage of the opportunities offered by the cloud infrastructure.
Therefore, this chapter will not discuss such custom architectures but will focus mainly on the various Platform as a Service (PaaS) storage offerings that are available in the cloud and on Azure. These offerings include scalable solutions based on plain disk space, relational databases, NoSQL databases, and in-memory data stores such as Redis.
Choosing a more adequate storage type is based not only on the application's functional...