Short, honest write-ups of the ideas that come up in interviews and on the job. Each one teaches the concept properly, cites the Microsoft documentation, and points back to the class that drills it until it sticks.
Same idea on all three — cheap, durable object storage over HTTPS — but Azure adds a storage-account layer that S3 and GCS don't have. Here's the mapping, the tier chart, and the one structural gotcha.
Azure Backup + ASR already protects your estate natively and cheaply. Where Rubrik earns its cost — multi-cloud, out-of-tenant isolation, centralized management — and where native wins.
Mount an SMB share with cloud-only Entra identities — no domain controllers, no storage keys. Entra Kerberos, the share roles, the client key, and why there is no password prompt.
File share (SMB) versus object store (HTTP) — pick by access pattern. Protocols, cost, and the scenarios where the answer is neither.
Enable the $web container, upload your site, find the endpoint — and the custom-domain HTTPS wall nobody warns you about.
Blob can't do custom-domain HTTPS alone. Put Front Door in front for a managed cert — and why older CDN guides now mislead.
HDD, SSD, Premium, Premium v2, Ultra — which managed disk to pick, by the IOPS and latency your workload needs, not the name. Plus the over-provisioning trap.
People say "Azure Storage" as if it is one thing, but a storage account hands you four separate data services — and reaching for the wrong one turns a five-minute task into a week of regret.
Every VM needs a disk, and Azure gives you a spectrum from bargain spinning-platter to blistering SSD. Choose the wrong end and you overpay for speed you never use, or throttle the workload you were trying to run.
The create dialog asks for a "type" before you have stored a byte — and unlike most Azure settings, you cannot change it later. What the choices mean, and why standard general-purpose v2 is almost always right.
Storing a file you touch daily and one you touch once a year at the same price is money on fire. Access tiers match cost to how often data is read — if you know the one tradeoff and the one trap (archive is offline).
Azure keeps multiple copies of everything in a storage account — the only question is where. One letter of the redundancy setting is the difference between surviving a dead drive and surviving a dead region.
One short, honest Azure note at a time — plus the occasional hiring signal. No spam, no card, unsubscribe in one click.