Introduction
In today’s cloud-driven environment, organizations require storage solutions that are secure, scalable, and highly available to ensure uninterrupted access to business-critical data. Public websites, in particular, rely heavily on reliable storage infrastructure for hosting images, documents, and other digital assets that must remain accessible even during regional outages.
In this project, I provisioned and configured an Azure Storage Account designed to support a public website with high availability and disaster recovery capabilities. The implementation included configuring Read-access Geo-redundant Storage (RA-GRS), enabling anonymous blob access, creating public blob containers, configuring blob soft delete for data recovery, and enabling blob versioning for document tracking and restoration.
This hands-on exercise demonstrates practical experience with Microsoft Azure Storage services, cloud infrastructure configuration, data protection strategies, and business continuity best practices.
Create a storage account to support the public website.
- In the portal, search for and select
- Select + Create.
- For resource group select new. Give your resource group a name and select OK.
Set the Storage account name to plantstrg. Make sure the storage account name is unique by adding an identifier.
Take the defaults for other settings.
- Select Review and then Create.
- Wait for the storage account to deploy, and then select Go to resource.
This storage requires high availability if there’s a regional outage. Additionally, enable read access to the secondary region
- In the storage account, in the Data management section, select the Redundancy blade.
- Ensure Read-access Geo-redundant storage is selected.
- Review the primary and secondary location information
Information on the public website should be accessible without requiring customers to login.
- In the storage account, in the Settings section, select the Configuration blade.
- Ensure the Allow blob anonymous access setting is Enabled.
- Be sure to Save your changes.
Create a blob storage container with anonymous read access
- In your storage account, in the Data storage section, select the Containers blade.
- Select + Container.
- Ensure the Name of the container is Public
- Select Create.
Customers should be able to view the images without being authenticated. Configure anonymous read access for the public container blobs.
- Select your public container.
- On the Overview blade, select Change access level.
- Ensure the Public access level is Blob (anonymous read access for blobs only).
- Select OK.
Practice uploading files and testing access.
- Ensure you are viewing your container.
- Select Upload.
- Browse to files and select a file. Browse to a file of your choice
- Select Upload.
- Close the upload window, Refresh the page and ensure your file was uploaded.
Determine the URL for your uploaded file. Open a browser and test the URL.
- Select your uploaded file.
- On the Overview tab, copy the URL.
- Paste the URL into a new browser tab
-If you have uploaded an image file it will display in the browser. Other file types should be downloaded.
It’s important that the website documents can be restored if they’re deleted. Configure blob soft delete for 21 days.
- Go to the Overview blade of the storage account.
- On the Properties page, locate the Blob service section.
- Select the Blob soft delete setting.
- Ensure the Enable soft delete for blobs is checked.
- Change the Keep deleted blobs for (in days) setting to 21.
- Notice you can also Enable soft delete for containers.
- Don’t forget to Save your changes.
If something gets deleted, you need to practice using soft delete to restore the files
- Navigate to your container where you uploaded a file.
- Select the file you uploaded and then select Delete.
- Select OK to confirm deleting the file.
- On the container Overview page, toggle the slider Show deleted blobs. This toggle is to the right of the search box.
- Select your deleted file, and use the ellipses on the far right, to Undelete the file.
- Refresh the container and confirm the file has been restored.
It’s important to keep track of the different website product document versions.
- Go to the Overview blade of the storage account.
- In the Properties section, locate the Blob service section.
- Select the Versioning setting.
- Ensure the Enable versioning for blobs checkbox is checked.
- Notice your options to keep all versions or delete versions after.
- Don’t forget to Save your changes.
Conclusion
This project demonstrates how Azure Storage Accounts can be configured to provide a resilient, scalable, and secure storage solution for public-facing web applications. By implementing high availability through RA-GRS redundancy, enabling controlled public access to blobs, configuring soft delete for recovery, and activating blob versioning, I established a storage environment capable of supporting reliable website operations while minimizing the risk of data loss.
Beyond simply provisioning storage resources, this exercise highlights the importance of designing cloud infrastructure with availability, recovery, and long-term maintainability in mind. These are critical considerations for modern organizations seeking to build dependable cloud-native solutions using Microsoft Azure.
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