While developing an application, we may need to store and access data in the Azure Storage account. If the amount of read and write access to the Azure Storage is high, this could result in huge costs for testing the application.
To provide local deployment and testing option to developers without incurring costs, Azure storage emulators have been provided. Storage emulators are tools that emulate Azure Blob, Queue and Table storage services for development and testing purposes, while storing the data in a local on-prem database.
Currently, there are two storage emulators available for Azure storage:
Azurite Open Source Emulator: This is a free open source storage emulator for Azure. Azurite provides support for multiple operating systems including Windows, Linux and MacOS. There are multiple ways to install and configure Azurite viz. Visual Studio Code extension, Node Packet Manager (NPM), Azurite Docker Image, GitHub Repository. Azurite has been marked by Microsoft as the future Storage Emulator platform for Azure. This means that Azurite will be updated as and when the Azure Storage APIs get updated.
Azure Storage Emulator: This is the original storage emulator provided by Microsoft for Azure. Azure Storage Emulator comes bundled with the Microsoft Azure SDK or can be downloaded from the Microsoft website, free of cost. Azure Storage Emulator creates a Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Express instance to emulate Azure storage on the local machine. This emulator may soon be deprecated as Azurite has been marked as the future storage emulator for Azure.
Azure Data Engineering 