How Do I Create an Azure Storage Account?

What Is an Azure Storage Account?

Storage in Azure is used to group data objects. For example, all the data is linked to a Finance and Operations instance or the working storage for an integration.

The description given by Microsoft ® is: ‘An Azure Storage Account contains all of your Azure Storage data objects, including blobs, file shares, queues, tables, and disks. The Storage Account provides a unique namespace for your Azure Storage data that's accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. Data in your storage account is durable and highly available, secure, and massively scalable.’

For more technical information, refer to Microsoft's ® documentation.

The creation and configuration of the Azure Storage requires the user to create new resources in Azure. If you are unsure of how to work within Azure, contact your system administrator.

Where Do We Use a Storage Account?

An example of where the Lasernet Solution for Dynamics requires working storage is when sending messages between FO and Lasernet The easiest and quickest way to set this up is to use the storage which comes natively with FO.

This works well for testing and DEV environments but can cause issues when migrating config between environments. This is where a separate Azure Storage Account can be very useful. By changing the Type to Azure Storage, it is possible to define a fixed storage account and maintain the relationships between our stored documents and our migrated configuration.

How Do I Create an Azure Storage Account?

1. Log in to the Azure Portal.

2. From the services at the top of the page, select Storage accounts or use the search bar.

This will take you to a list of the Azure Storage Accounts in your subscriptions.

3. Click Create.

The following screen is displayed:

4. Ensure all the information is filled in, and then click Review.

If your config passes the review, the Create button becomes available.

5. Once you have clicked Create, you will see that the deployment is in progress. Once the deployment is complete, you will be able to navigate directly to the resource:

Once the resource is created, the following screen is displayed:

6. Two actions must be taken to reference this storage account in Lasernet: copying the Connection String and creating a container to store our data in.

Create a Container

1. Navigate to Containers.

2. Click +Container to add a new container.

The following screen is displayed:

3. Give your storage container a name, accept the other defaults, and click Create.

You can see your new container has been added to the list:

Copy the Access Key

1. To copy the access key, navigate to Access keys on the left of the storage account window.

2. From within this screen, copy the connection string linked to key1, click Show, and then use the Copy to clipboard icon to copy the whole string.

Apply the Configuration

Copy the Connection string from the storage account into the Connection string field in Lasernet Connector.

Once the connection string has been copied in, the instance name for the storage container is available to select from the drop-down menu: