Azure has Storage accounts and Storage accounts (classic) in the Azure Portal.
What are the differences between them? Is there any reason to migrate from a classic storage account to a new storage account?
Azure – Difference between new and classic storage accounts in Azure
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If you're referring to a Windows Azure Storage account, the storage account name would be the dns prefix you created (e.g. mystorage.blob.core.windows.net - the name would be mystorage).
You then get two keys - primary and secondary. Specify either. You have two so you can give one out to someone (such as giving the secondary key to a 3rd-party monitoring company) and revoke it by changing the key, without impacting you (assuming you're using the primary key for yourself).
Web Roles give you several features beyond Web Apps (formerly Web Sites):
- Ability to run elevated startup scripts to install apps, modify registry settings, install performance counters, fine-tune IIS, etc.
- Ability to split an app up into tiers (maybe Web Role for front end, Worker Role for backend processing) and scale independently
- Ability to RDP into your VM for debugging purposes
- Network isolation
- Dedicated virtual IP address, which allows web role instances in a cloud service to access IP-restricted Virtual Machines
- ACL-restricted endpoints (added in Azure SDK 2.3, April 2014)
- Support for any TCP/UDP ports (Web Sites are restricted to TCP 80/443)
Web Apps have advantages over Web Roles though:
- Near-instant deployment with deployment history / rollbacks
- Visual Studio Online, github, local git, ftp, CodePlex, DropBox, BitBucket deployment support
- Ability to roll out one of numerous CMS's and frameworks, (like WordPress, Joomla, Django, MediaWiki, etc.)
- Use of SQL Database or MySQL
- Simple and fast to scale from free tier to shared tier to dedicated tier
- Web Jobs
- Backups of Web Site content
- Built-in web-based debugging tools (simple cmd/powershell debug console, process explorer, diagnostic tools like log streaming, etc.)
With the April 2014 and September 2014 rollouts, there are now some features common to both Web Apps and Web Roles (and Worker Roles), including:
- Staging+production slots
- Wildcard DNS, SSL certificates
- Visual Studio integration
- Traffic Manager support
- Virtual Network support
Here's a screengrab I took from the Web Sites gallery selection form:
I think Web Apps are a great way to get up and running quickly, where you can move from shared to reserved resources. Once you outgrow this, you can then move up to Web Roles and expand as you need.
Best Answer
Classic storage accounts are created using existing Service Management API's (the REST API stack that's been available for the past several years). The newer storage accounts are created with the new Azure Resource Manager (ARM) API's (which are also wrapped in PowerShell and CLI now). Ultimately they provide the same resources to your apps, but they're created/managed differently, and there are a few nuanced differences (such as the ability to tag resources that are created via ARM scripts).
You can't convert a classic storage account (or any classic resource) to a newer type. You don't really need to anyway, unless you're trying to mix resources from classic and new, such as adding ARM-based virtual machines to a classic-based virtual network, or spin up an ARM-based VM from a vhd image sitting in a classic storage account (and for that example, you could always just copy the vhd to a new storage account). Note that, for general storage usage (blobs/tables/queues), you just need the URI and the primary (or secondary) key. With those, you can access your storage resources from anywhere, from any VM/website/etc, regardless if you're accessing storage from classic or new virtual machines, for example.
Check out this link for a general list of differences between classic and new resources.