A free tool of Microsoft, Azure Storage Explorer is available on Linux, Mac and Windows. You can use this tool to manage contents of storage account easily. You can also easily access the virtual machine disks as well as work with the classic storage accounts or Azure Resource manager.
Unlike the other storage explorer tools integrating with Azure, this tool chiefly uses an account for authenticating with Azure. Next, it shows subscriptions the account has rights and the storage accounts available for that subscription.
You will love this tool if you need the following:
- Access blob storage
- Check message queue
- Move your files to and from the data lake.
You can get Azure Storage Explorer at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/features/storage-explorer/.
Install Azure Storage Explorer
To install the explorer, download it from Microsoft and then run it on your laptop.
You can launch this tool only after you accept the destination location, license agreement and the start menu.
After installing the tool, authenticate it using your Live ID or Azure ID. By default, the storage accounts from the subscriptions you have access are displayed.
From here, you can download or upload content and perform asynchronous copy operations from the server side.
What Can You Do with the Azure Storage Explorer?
Azure offers multiple storage options, like blob, table, file storage and queue. You can use this tool to manage all of these.
Types of Cloud Storage Supported by Storage Explorer
Different types of cloud storage options are available with this tool. Let us look at them.
Queue Storage: This is a short-term storage as the messages on queues can be stored for only seven days.
This type of storage is accessible through HTTP or HTTPs method calls.
Table Storage: This type of cloud storage can store large amount of data. You can access data by using clustered index in this case.
Do you know the prime advantage of this storage?
You can scale it whenever necessary.
Blob Storage: This is created for the bigger files where you can store large amounts of data. You can access this storage like external hard drive.
This type of cloud storage is also scalable and used for both text as well as binary data. You can use this storage to store video files, images, PDFs, audio files and bigger documents.
File Storage: You can store files simply in the cloud.
You can regard this storage as a cost-effective extension of on-premise datacentre file server storage.
Azure Storage Explorer cannot create storage account. You need to create it online through your Azure subscription. After this storage account is created, all blobs, tables, files and queues are listed under that account.
Azure Storage Explorer allows you to continue your work disconnected from cloud with the local emulators. This helps to boost efficiency and productivity, and at the same time, reduce cost. The best feature of this tool? It is built on Azure security.
You are bound to find this tool very useful.
It will make your life easier and well, all of us wants to make life easy, right?
