Azure Storage Account | Deletion and Reuse

Problem Space

When it comes to creating Azure Storage Accounts, the name has some very important rules that need to be kept in mind. These rules will not only be important in the creation of the resource, but will be critical in deletion and reuse.

The rules are as follows:

1. Storage account names must be between 3 and 24 characters in length and may contain numbers and lowercase letters only.

2. Your storage account name must be unique within Azure. No two storage accounts can have the same name.

   ¹‘A storage account provides a unique namespace in Azure for your data. Every object that you store in Azure Storage has a URL address that includes your unique account name. The combination of the account name and the service endpoint forms the endpoints for your storage account.’

So point being, once you create your storage account with the given name, no other tenant can have another storage account with the same name.

So what does this look like for development?

• What happens when I delete a storage account in my tenant and recreate it?
• What happens if I am doing cross tenant development, and I delete the account in one tenant and want to create it in another?

Storage Account Deletion

When a Storage Account is deleted, the account is soft deleted for 14 days with the possibility of recovery. See recovery rules.

The methods of deletion are as follows:

• Azure Portal
• Azure CLI
• Azure PowerShell
• Azure Rest API

Same Tenant Development

If say you are developing an Azure solution that uses an Azure Storage Account, and you have a development release cycle that deploys the solution and then deprovisions it. OR you are simply deleting the Storage Account and then recreating it with the same name.

This will be fine. However, you will lose any possibilities of recovery of the previously deleted Storage Account.

Cross Tenant Development

In the instance that you are developing with a Storage Account in one tenant and then decide to deploy this account into another tenant having deleted it in the previous. This will not be possible until the 14 day recovery period has subsided.

Summary

Make sure you are aware of the names you provide your Storage Accounts, this is lesser of a problem with single tennant development, however can cause issues when moving into cross tenant development.

For the original version of this post see Andrew Wilson's personal blog at Azure Storage Account | Deletion and Reuse