Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer: Setup, Connect, & Understand

Microsoft Azure Storage account, a great service offered by Microsoft Azure to meet storage requirements on the cloud for customers, is an excellent option. Azure Storage can be accessed via the Azure portal’s web browser. It would be wonderful if you could also access the Azure Storage services from your local machine. Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer is the perfect tool to use cloud storage with the same functionality and ease as Windows explorer.
Azure Storage Explorer is a cross-platform client-based tool that makes it easy to manage multiple Azure storage services.
Today we will show you how to connect storage explorer to your Azure storage services. We also introduce you to some of the capabilities that storage explorer has to offer.
TABLE OF CONTENTS1. Installation and Setup 2. Connectivity Azure Storage Explorer 4. Benefits5. Conclusion Installation and setup
Navigate to the Microsoft website to download the appropriate installation file for your operating system. We will select windows.
Once the download is complete you can run the.exe file. Next, select the installation mode and accept the license agreement. Finally, choose the path to install the program.
Connectivity
This section will discuss various ways to connect with Azure Storage Accounts using storage explorer.
The first option is a direct connection with subscription. Select an environment, such as azure, and then click Next. You will be redirected directly to a browser to authenticate your azure account. After authentication, you can connect to all storage accounts that are associated with your Azure account.
The second option is to connect to Azure storage account via access keys. In some cases, we may not want full access to the Azure storage account. In such cases, we can use connection strings (keys or SAS), which are specific to the storage account that we wish to connect to. Next, select the connection string option. Next, enter your display name and the connection string. These are available in the Azure portal of our azure storage accounts. The below image explains how to get a connection string.
Another way to connect is by using account name (storage name) and key(access key). You can also use the Shared access signature URL option to connect. This allows you to restrict access to storage accounts and components based upon time and date.
Azure Storage Explorer: Functionalities and how to use them
This section will discuss different ways to work with Azure storage explorer and azure blob container files.
With azure blobs, we can do many activities. In our example test, we create a new container. All the blobs are then uploaded to our container. We can also list our containers and work on them.
Uploading allows us to choose from three Blob types: Block Blob, Page Blob, and Append Blob. Here, we choose Block Blob. You can choose Hot, Cold, or Archive as the tier.
Blobs can be used to perform operations such as delete, download, rename and changing access tier. You can also use folder statistics to get information about the blobs within a folder.
Azure storage explorer uses AZ Copy Utility in the backend for all operations on storage accounts.
We can also configure CORS settings or soft delete policy for existing blogs.
File shares can perform similar functions. You can either list or create files in your storage account. This creates a new file sharing account with the name “fs”.
We can perform actions like delete, upload, and clone on the file share. We have created a directory, and uploaded some files to it.