Storage Account

6 minutes to complete

It’s time to deploy our first resource!

Add a Storage Account resource

Before we can deploy a serverless application, we need to create a Storage Account. Every Azure Functions application requires a Storage Account for its internal needs.

Copy-and-paste the following snippet into the resources array of your azureDeploy.json file:

{
    "type": "Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts",
    "name": "mysa",
    "apiVersion": "2018-02-01",
    "location": "westus",
    "kind": "StorageV2",
    "sku": {
        "name": "Standard_LRS"
    }
}

Note: Here and at the later steps, we build the file incrementally. You should add the snippets inside your existing azuredeploy.json file instead of replacing the previous lines.

Pro-tip: In VS Code, use Shift + Alt + F or Shift + Option + F to auto-format your code after copy-pasting.

Each resource, including our Storage Account, has the following properties:

  • type defines the namespace and the type of resource
  • name is the name of the resource to be created
  • apiVersion is a specific version of the resource definition format; the selection differs per resource type, but it always has a date in it
  • location is the Azure region to deploy the resource to (don’t change westus for now, it’s part of the plan)

The other parameters from the snippet are specific to Storage Accounts: kind and sku define what type of account we want to create. This time we went for a locally-redundant V2 general-purpose account.

Deploy the resource

Rerun the deployment command:

$ az group deployment create --template-file azureDeploy.json -g arm-workshop -o table

However, this time, the deployment fails:

Deployment failed. Correlation ID: d8383713-1f3d-4b89-b882-cbcb9942cfda. {
  "error": {
    "code": "StorageAccountAlreadyTaken",
    "message": "The storage account named mysa is already taken."
  }
}

This error happens because each Storage Account gets a subdomain of blob.core.windows.net, therefore the name has to be globally unique across all Azure subscriptions worldwide.

Change the name of the Storage Account to something unique, e.g., add some random characters, and try deploying again. Eventually, you should see the success message.

Checkpoint

List the resources in your Resource Group with the command below:

$ az resource list -g arm-workshop -o table

Name            ResourceGroup Location    Type
--------------  ------------- ----------  ---------------------------------
mysauniquename  arm-workshop  westus      Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts

The list should contain the newly created Storage Account.

If you have any difficulties, compare your code with this sample.

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