You can't mount Azure Blob Storage as a native share on a virtual machine.
Pricing: Blob storage is much cheaper than file storage.
Azure Blob Storage isn't hierarchical beyond containers. You can add files that have / or \ characters in them that are interpreted as folders by many apps that read blob storage.
Azure File Service provides a SMB protocol interface to Azure Blob Storage which solves the problem with (1).
Portability:
With blob storage, if you decide to migrate to a diff platform in future you may have to change your app code but
with File storage you can migrate your app to any other platform that supports SMB (assuming you are using native file system APIs in your app)
Use this rule of thumb:
- If you are developing a new application then leverage the native Azure API directly into Blob Storage.
- If you are porting an existing application that needs to share files then use Azure File Service.
