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2 system design questions lean on this idea. Each walks through the full answer.
System Design Masterclass · Database Types Storage
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Picture a hospital's electronic health records system. Patient name, date of birth, blood type, those fit neatly into database columns. But what about the chest X-ray? The MRI scan? The 200-page PDF of surgical notes?
You can't stuff a 500 MB MRI scan into a VARCHAR column. Well, technically you can, databases support BLOB (Binary Large Object) columns, but your DBA will hunt you down. Querying a table where rows contain multi-megabyte binary data turns every simple SELECT into a memory-hogging disaster.
This is the problem blob storage solves. It's purpose-built for large, unstructured binary data, the files that don't fit into tables and don't need the overhead of a full file system.
Here's where terminology gets messy, and it trips up a lot of engineers.
Object storage (like AWS S3) and blob storage (like Azure Blob Storage) are fundamentally the same thing. They both store arbitrary binary data with metadata, accessed via APIs, in a flat or semi-flat namespace.
The term "blob storage" is primarily an Azure thing. Microsoft Azure calls their object storage service "Blob Storage." AWS calls theirs "S3." Google calls theirs "Cloud Storage." They're all solving the same problem.
| Service | Provider | What It's Called | Same Thing? |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 | AWS | Object Storage | Yes |
| Blob Storage | Azure | Blob Storage | Yes |
| Cloud Storage | GCP | Object Storage | Yes |
| MinIO | Open Source | Object Storage | Yes |
When someone says "blob storage" in conversation, they might mean:
Context tells you which one.