To create a storage account, log in to the Windows Azure management portal. After you log in to the portal you can quickly create a Storage Account by clicking on the large NEW icon at the bottom left hand of the portal.
From the expanding menu select the ‘Data Services’ option, then ‘Storage’ and finally, ‘Quick Create’.
You will now need to provide a name for your storage account in the URL textbox. This name is used as part of the URL for the service endpoint and so it must be globally unique. The portal will alert you if you select a name that is already in use. The next step is for you to select a location for your storage account by choosing one of the data center locations in the dropdown. This location will be the primary storage location for your data, or more simply, your account will reside in this Data Center. You may also see an additional dropdown if you have more than one Windows Azure subscription. This allows you to select the subscription that the account will be related to.
All storage accounts are stored in triplicate, with transactionally-consistent copies in the primary data center. In addition to that redundancy, you can also choose to have ‘Geo Replication’ enabled for the storage account. ‘Geo Replication‘ means that the Windows Azure Table data that you place into the account will be replicated in triplicate to another data center within the same region. So, if you select ‘East US’ for your primary storage location, your account will also have a triplicate copy stored in the West US data center. This mapping is done automatically by Microsoft and you can’t control the location of your secondary replication, but it will never be outside of a region so you don’t have to worry about your West US based account somehow getting replicated to Europe or Asia as part of the Geo Replication feature. Storage accounts that have Geo Replication enabled are referred to as geo redundant storage (GRS) and cost slightly more than accounts that do not have it enabled, which are called locally redundant storage (LRS).
Click ‘Create Storage Account‘ once you have selected the location and provided an account name. In a few moments the Windows Azure portal will then generate the storage account for you. When the account is fully created, you will see a status of Online. By selecting the new storage account in the portal, you can retrieve one of the access keys we will need in order to work with the storage account.
Click on the ‘Manage Access Keys’ at the bottom of the screen to display the storage account name and two 512 bit storage access keys used to authenticate requests to the storage account. Whoever has these keys will have complete control over your storage account short of deleting the entire account. They would have the ability to upload BLOBs, modify table data and destroy queues. These account keys should be treated as a secret in the same way that you would guard passwords or a private encryption key. Both of these keys are active so that if necessary you can perform a rolling change in configuration for all applications utilizing the accounts in case one of the keys is compromised.
Your storage account is now created and we have what we need to work with it. For now, get a copy of the Primary Access Key by clicking on the ‘copy’ icon next to the text box. Now that we have our storage account set up we can talk about Table Storage.
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