Hello all,

Azure Files is part off Azure Storage that gives you the ability to create fully accessible SMB file shares. Azure file shares can be mounted concurrently by cloud or on-premises deployments of Windows, Linux, and macOS.

In general, process is pretty simple, but in this post I will show you how to do that.

Once you are logged in Azure Portal, just find Storage Account as an Azure resource and start with creation process.

On the Basics tab, you need to define resource group, location, storage account name and few more performance based parameters.

TIP: Storage account is part of Azure PaaS services and have unique FQDN in format {accountname}.{blob/file/queue/table}.core.windows.net. Due to this functionality, your storage account name MUST be unique.

Once you finished with Basics tab, on Advanced tab you need to configure some security things. By default, Secure transfer required in enabled and if you don’t have really good reason, don’t change this. You can define whether your storage account will be accessible from all networks or specific networks only.

When you have created storage account, you need to create Azure Files container and you will be ready for the game.

If you have plan to configure this using Azure PowerShell, just execute following commands.

# Define Variables
$Location           = "North Europe"
$StorageRG          = "TechTrainer-Storage"
$StorageName        = "azurefstechtrainer"
$fileContainerName  = "fileshare"

# Create resource group for storage
New-AzResourceGroup -Name $StorageRG -Location $Location

# Create storage account
New-AzStorageAccount -ResourceGroupName $StorageRG -Name $StorageName -SkuName Standard_LRS -Kind StorageV2 -Location $Location -AccessTier Hot

# Create blob and file share containers
$StorageAccountContext = (Get-AzStorageAccount -Name $StorageName -ResourceGroupName $StorageRG).Context
New-AzStorageShare -Name $fileContainerName -Context $StorageAccountContext

Easy? 🙂