You are designing an internet-facing application hosted in Azure that will store video files ranging from 50 MB to 12 GB. The application will use certificate-based authentication. Recommend the Azure storage option that provides the fastest read performance while minimizing storage costs.

Azure Blob Storage is the most suitable option because it is optimized for storing large amounts of unstructured data, like video files, and offers excellent read performance at a cost-effective price point. It supports certificate-based authentication through Azure Active Directory integration. Azure Files is primarily for shared file access and lacks the performance and cost efficiency for large-scale video storage. Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is designed for big data analytics workloads, offering high throughput but potentially higher costs than standard Blob Storage for simple object storage. Azure SQL Database is a relational database service and is not designed for storing large binary files like videos; it would be inefficient and expensive for this use case.