Azure Storage is a service that plays a very important part in Microsoft Azure. Almost all Azure services use storage in one form or another. In some cases, it's obvious that storage is used, in others it's a service in the background we don't realize even exists.

For example, if we create a new VM, virtual disks are created in the process. These disks are stored in Azure Storage. If managed disks are used, storage is created in the background and not visible. If we don't use managed disks, storage created in the process is shown among resources, since managing storage is our responsibility when managed disks are not used.

Similar to this, when any PaaS resource is created, storage is created in the background. In most PaaS cases, storage is not directly visible, but we can see the amount of storage available and used in the resource blade. For example, Azure SQL database or Azure App Service plan have a certain amount of resources available depending on the tier. We don't have direct access to storage management but we can see information about storage space.

But Azure Storage can be used as stand alone service and managed independently. In order to explain this service, let's start with creating a new Azure Storage account.