Understanding the Azure Storage architecture
Learning how to work with Azure Storage and how to design it to fit your solution is everyone's purpose, but learning what is going on behind the scenes and what every piece means is what makes you an expert.
Azure Storage is a distributed storage software stack built by Microsoft. The storage access architecture consists of the following three layers:
- Front-End layer
- Partition layer
- Stream layer
Front-End layer
The Front-End layer is responsible for receiving incoming requests, their authentication, and authorization, and then delivers them to a partition server in the Partition layer.
You may wonder, how does the frontend know which partition server to forward each request to? The answer is pretty easy, because the frontend caches a partition map.
And here, a new question will pop up, what is a partition map? It is responsible for keeping track of the partitions of the storage service being accessed, and which partition server controls access to each...
