Azure's general-purpose object storage service for storing any type of unstructured data — images, videos, backups, log files, and static website assets. Data is organized into storage accounts that hold containers (equivalent to buckets in S3 or GCS), and each container holds an unlimited number of blobs (the actual files). Blob Storage offers three access tiers to balance cost and retrieval speed: hot (for data accessed frequently), cool (for data accessed infrequently but stored for at least 30 days), and archive (for rarely accessed data with retrieval times measured in hours). It is also the underlying infrastructure that Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is built upon — ADLS Gen2 adds a hierarchical namespace and analytics-optimized access protocols on top of the same durable object store. Use Blob Storage when you need cheap, scalable storage for files; use ADLS Gen2 when you need analytics performance and Hadoop-compatible directory semantics on top of that same foundation.
A media company stores user-uploaded profile photos and video thumbnails in a Blob Storage container set to the hot tier for fast retrieval. Raw video files that are rarely re-processed are moved to the cool tier after 30 days and archived after 90 days — cutting storage costs by over 80% compared to keeping everything in hot.
All these services provide scalable object storage solutions for unstructured data, with varying features and pricing models.