An Introduction to Windows Azure BLOB Storage. Windows Azure BLOB storage service can be used to store and retrieve Binary Large Objects (BLOBs), or what are more commonly known as files. In this introduction to the Windows Azure BLOB Storage service we will cover the difference between the types of BLOBs you can store, how to get files into and out of the service, how you can add metadata to your files and more. The Wiki Ninjas Guide to SharePoint 2013 : The Wiki Ninjas Guide to SharePoint 2013 - IDTP : Integration of HTTP/ HTTPs WCF Services (REST & SOAP) in SharePoint 2013. What I am trying to do is connect to the Azure Storage Rest API List Blobs. Ref: http:// I have tried to. Discusses the various methods of copying data from on-prem to Azure Blob Storage. The Microsoft Azure storage services support both HTTP and HTTPS; however, using HTTPS is highly recommended. More samples. For additional examples using Blob storage, see Getting Started with Azure Blob Storage in.NET. You can download the sample application and run it, or. I want to communicate to Azure using REST APIs from PowerShell. How can I do this? Azure interacts primarily through RESTful APIs. Even behind the. Behind the scenes, the client library is making a call to the REST API to retrieve the content of the file. This may result in one or more calls to the REST API just. Add vision, speech, language, and knowledge capabilities to your applications using intelligence APIs and SDKs from Cognitive Services. There are many reasons why you should consider using BLOB storage. Perhaps you want to share files with clients, or off- load some of the static content from your web servers to reduce the load on them. However, if you are using Azure’s Platform as a Service (Paa. S), also known as Cloud Services, you’ll most likely be very interested in BLOB storage because it provides persistent data storage. With Cloud Services you get dedicated virtual machines to run your code on without having to worry about managing those virtual machines. Unlike the hard drives found in Windows Azure Virtual Machines (the Infrastructure as a Service - Iaa. S- offering from Microsoft), the hard drives used in Cloud Services instances are not persistent. Because of this, any files you want to have around long term should be put into a persistent store, and this is where BLOB storage is so useful. Where Do We Start? BLOB Storage, along with Windows Azure Tables and Windows Azure Queues make up the three Windows Azure Storage services. Azure tables are a non- relational, key- value- pair storage mechanism and the Queue service provides basic message- queuing capabilities. All three of these services store their data within a Windows Azure Storage Account which we will need to get started. At the time of writing, each account can hold up to 2. TB of data in any combination of Tables, Queues or BLOBs and all three can be accessed via public HTTP or HTTPS REST based endpoints, or through a variety of client libraries that wrap the REST interface. To get started using the BLOB service, we’ll first need to have a Windows Azure account and create a Storage Account. You can get a free trial account or, if you have a MSDN Subscription, you can sign up for your Windows Azure benefits in order to try out the examples included in this article. After you have signed up for your Azure account, you can then create a storage account that can then be used to store BLOBs. To create a storage account, log in to the Windows Azure management portal at https: //manage. After you log in to the portal you can quickly create a Storage Account by clicking on the large NEW icon at the bottom left hand of the portal. From the expanding menu select the . This name is used as part of the URL for the service endpoint and so it must be globally unique. The portal will indicate whether the name is available whenever you pause or finish typing. Next, you select a location for your storage account by selecting one of the data center locations in the dropdown. If you have created . If you have more than one Windows Azure subscriptions related to your login address, you may also see a dropdown list to enable you to select the Azure subscription that the account will belong to. All storage accounts are stored in triplicate, with transactionally- consistent copies in the primary data center. In addition to that redundancy, you can also choose to have . So, if you select . This mapping is done automatically by Microsoft and you can’t control the location of your secondary replication, but it will never be outside of a region so you don’t have to worry about your West US based account somehow getting replicated to Europe or Asia as part of the Geo Replication feature. Storage accounts that have Geo Replication enabled are referred to as geo redundant storage (GRS) and cost slightly more than accounts that do not have it enabled, which are called locally redundant storage (LRS). Once you have selected the location and provided a name, you can click the . The Windows Azure portal will then generate the storage account for you within a few moments. When the account is fully created, you will see a status of Online. By selecting the new storage account in the portal, you can retrieve one of the access keys we will need in order to work with the storage account. Click on the . Whoever has these keys will have complete control over your storage account short of deleting the entire account. They would have the ability to upload BLOBs, modify table data and destroy queues. These account keys should be treated as a secret in the same way that you would guard passwords or a private encryption key. Both of these keys are active and will work to access your storage account. It is a good practice to use one of the keys for all the applications that utilize this storage account so that, if that key becomes compromised, you can use this dialog to regenerate the key you haven’t been using, then update the all the apps to use that newly regenerated key and finally regenerate the compromised key. This would prevent anyone abusing the account with the compromised key. Your storage account is now created and we have what we need to work with it. For now, get a copy of the Primary Access Key by clicking on the copy icon next to the text box. What Kind of BLOB is that? Any file type can be stored in the Windows Azure BLOB Storage service, such as Image files, database files, text files, or virtual hard drive files. However, when they are uploaded to the service they are stored as either a Page BLOB or a Block BLOB depending on how you plan on using that file or the size of the file you need to work with. Page BLOBs are optimized for random reads and writes so they are most commonly used when storing virtual hard drive files for virtual machines: In fact, the Page BLOB was introduced when the first virtual drive for Windows Azure was announced: the Windows Azure Cloud Drive (at the time they were known as Windows Azure X- Drives). Nowadays, the persisted disks used by Windows Azure Virtual Machine (Microsoft’s Iaa. S offering) also use the Page BLOB to store their data and Operating System drives. Each Page BLOB is made up of one or more 5. TB per file. The majority of files that you upload would benefit from being stored as Block BLOBs, which are written to the storage account as a series of blocks and then committed into a single file. We can create a large file by breaking it into blocks, which can be uploaded concurrently and then then committed together into a single file in one operation. This provides us with faster upload times and better throughput. The client storage libraries manage this process by uploading files of less than 6. MB in size in a single operation, and uploading larger files across multiple operations by breaking down the files and running the concurrent uploads. A Block BLOB has a maximum size of 2. GB. For this article we will be using Block BLOBs in the examples. Upload a File Already! With a storage account created, and our access key available, we can utilize any of the three Windows Azure storage services including BLOB storage from outside of Windows Azure. Of course, you’ll want a way of viewing your BLOB storage in the same way you look at any other file system. We’ll show you how a bit later, but if you’re developing an application, your first concern will probably be to have the means to upload files automatically from code. We will therefore now look at the code that is required to upload a file, starting with a simple console application that uploads a file using the 2. Windows Azure . NET client library in C#. When the standard console application is created from the template, it will not have a reference to the storage client library. We will add it using the Package Manager (Nu. Get). Right- click on the project, and select . This will load up the Package Manager UI. Select the . As of the time of this writing version 2. Select the Windows Azure Storage package and click . If you prefer to manage your packages via the Package Manager Console, you can also type Install- Package Windows. Azure. Storage to achieve the same result. The Package Manager will add the references needed by the storage client library. Some of these references won’t be utilized when just working with BLOB storage. Below you can see that several assembly references were added, but specifically the Microsoft. Windows. Azure. Configuration and Microsoft. Windows. Azure. Storage assemblies are what we will be working with in this example. Open up the program. Microsoft. Windows. Azure. Storage; using. Microsoft. Windows. Azure. Storage. Auth; using. Microsoft. Windows. Azure. Storage. Blob; Then add this code to the Main method: 1. Name=. Also, substitute the file name used with the Open. Read method with a file that you wish to upload. I’d suggest an image or something small for this example. The account name and key values are used to create a Storage. Credential instance, which is then used to create an instance of the Cloud. Storage. Account object. The Cloud. Storage. Account object represents a storage account that you will be accessing. From this object you can obtain references to BLOBs, tables and queues within the storage account. Note that when we create the instance of the Cloud. Storage. Account, we specify . This will cause all of our operation calls to our storage account to be encrypted with SSL. Because all wire- level communications are therefore encrypted, and all requests are signed using the credentials provided in the Storage. Credential object, we can have some confidence that our operations are secure from prying eyes. Since we are using BLOB storage, we then create an instance of a Cloud. Blob. Client object to provide the client interface that is needed to work with BLOBs. Using the Cloud. Blob. Client object we then get a reference to a container. A container is much like a base directory off the root of a hard drive. In this case, the container we are getting a reference to is named “samples”. On the next line, we call Create. Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server Published: October 1. Updated: October 1. Applies To: Windows Azure Pack. Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server is a hybrid cloud solution that brings Windows Azure technologies to your datacenter. It lets Microsoft customers offer a rich, self- service, multi- tenant cloud on your datacenter’s hardware at no additional cost. You can learn more about the benefits of Windows Azure Pack by reading the datasheet PDF. To install Windows Azure Pack, check out the deployment pages. Windows Azure Pack integrates with Windows Server, System Center, and SQL Server to offer a cost- effective, self- service portal and cloud services: Windows Azure Pack Feature. Description. Tenant portal. A customizable self- service portal that tenants can use to provision, monitor, and manage services such as web site and virtual machine clouds. Admin portal. A portal for administrators to manage resource clouds, user accounts, tenant offers, quotas, and pricing. Service management APIA REST API to develop a range of integration scenarios including custom portal and billing systems. Virtual Machine Clouds service. Supports infrastructure- as- a- service (Iaa. S) capabilities for Windows and Linux virtual machines. Windows Azure Pack: Web Sites. Provides a high- density, scalable shared web hosting platform for ASP. NET, PHP, and Node. Service Bus Clouds service. Provides reliable messaging services between distributed applications. SQL and My. SQL services. Provide database instances that can be used in conjunction with the Web Sites service. Automation. Automate and integrate additional custom services into the services framework, including a runbook editor and execution environment. International language support. English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, and Russian.
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