Azure Storage Connected Services

An Azure storage account is a secure account that gives you access to several different types of Azure Storage Services.

The Azure Storage Connected Service provide designtime tools, within Visual Studio to configure the Azure Storage Service, create, and/or consume a Storage Account, and configure your Visual Studio project to consume Azure Storage.

Upon completion, the Azure Storage Connected Service will provide guidance for how to complete the configuration of your project to meet the scenarios you need.

About Azure Storage

Before you can create a storage account, you must have an Azure subscription, which is a plan that gives you access to a variety of Azure services. You can create up to 100 uniquely named storage accounts with a single subscription. See Storage Pricing Details for information on volume pricing.

You can get started with Azure with a free trial. Once you decide to purchase a plan, you can choose from a variety of purchase options. If you’re an MSDN subscriber, you get free monthly credits that you can use with Azure services, including Azure Storage.

Standard Storage Accounts

A standard storage account gives you access to Blob storage, Table storage, Queue storage, and File storage:

• Blob storage stores file data. A blob can be any type of text or binary data, such as a document, media file, or application installer.
• Table storage stores structured datasets. Table storage is a NoSQL key-attribute data store, which allows for rapid development and fast access to large quantities of data.
• Queue storage provides reliable messaging for workflow processing and for communication between components of cloud services.
• File storage (Preview) offers shared storage for legacy applications using the standard SMB 2.1 protocol. Azure virtual machines and cloud services can share file data across application components via mounted shares, and on-premise applications can access file data in a share via the File service REST API. File storage is available by request via the Azure Preview page.

Each standard storage account can contain up to 500 TB of combined blob, queue, table, and file data. See the Azure Storage Scalability and Performance Targets for details about standard storage account capacity.

More Information

• Using the Azure Storage Connected Service
• Introduction to Azure Storage

Version Information

• 1.0.50619.2 Version shipped with Visual Studio 2015, without Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) support
• 1.1.50716.3 Update to support CSP Accounts
• 1.1.50729.1 Localization bug fixed related to installs for the following languages: Turkish, Czech, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil). No functionality was changed