In previous article, we have seen some basic concepts around storage account. In this article, let’s have a look at how can we create a storage account.

There are multiple ways using which you can create the Azure storage account. Some of them are:

• You can use Azure Portal UI to create the storage account.
• You can use PowerShell or Azure CLI to create the storage account.
• You can also use Client SDKs to create the storage account programatically
• Or you can also use ARM templates.

We already have seen how to create a storage account using ARM template, in one of my previous blogs.

In this article, let’s try to create using Azure Portal UI and CLI.

You need to make sure that you have a valid and active azure subscription in order to follow the below steps. If you do not have it, you can get a free azure subscription.

Let’s Begin !

Go to Azure Portal and Login. You should be able to see the homepage.

On the left side navigation, select “Create a resource” option and search for storage account. Then click on create. You will be able to see the create storage account panel as shown below.

You will have to provide below inputs:

• Subscription which is active and valid azure subscription
• Resource group, a logical container for the storage account
• Storage account name, globally unique name as it is part of HTTP URL which is used to access storage account data
• Geographical location, where the storage account will be created
• Performance tier, standard or premium
• Account kind, for most of the scenarios you will select general purpose v2
• Replication, the redundancy level to keep your data highly available
• Access tier, hot for frequently accessed data and cool for infrequently accessed data

The therms replication, access tier, account kind are discussed in my previous blog.

When you click on Next button, you will be presented with networking connectivity related settings.

The Azure storage can be accessed from anywhere in the world. You can also configure it to be available only from private networks. This tab allows you to specify the network details if you want it to be privately accessible.

When you click on Next button on Networking tab, you will be presented with next section in wizard.

These advanced section will ask for below details:

• security, if enabled it will allow https access only
• data protection, to enable blob soft delete so as to avoid data loss because of accidental deletion
• Some settings related to data lake storage. Keep them default for this blog purpose.

When you click on next button of advanced tab, you will be brought to Tags page in wizard.

Tags are key value pairs which can be used to organize the resources. For example, we have added an environment tag and its value is dev. This means the resource is being created for dev environment.

When you click on Next button you will go to the last page, review and create page of wizard.

On this last page, everything will be validated and if validation passes, you can click on create button. It will trigger deployment of the storage account.

The storage account creation may take few seconds.

That’s it. You have created the storage account successfully.

Using Azure CLI

You can perform the creation of storage account using the script below.

# to create storage account
az storage account create \
    --location westeurope \
    --name myfirststorageaccount \
    --resource-group SamplesRG \
    --sku Standard_GRS

Storage Explorer

If you have installed storage explorer on your windows or mac machine, then you can connect with Azure subscription account. This will show the storage accounts you have under the Azure subscription.

The tool will provide UI to interact with Azure table storage.

I hope this article has provided you sufficient information about azure storage. Let me know your thoughts.