I'm trying to know if there is a maximum data retention period for data stored in a Blob Storage?
What I'm trying to know is if I store something in a Blob Storage, are there any risks that this data will be deleted by Microsoft after a certain period of time?
Azure Storage is durable: Unless you delete an object (or storage account), or cancel your subscription, your data persists.
Data can also be deleted if you've configured a data lifecycle policy (e.g. delete blobs older than a specified number of days).
Related
I have an azure blob storage to migrate csv files to azure SQL Database. Data will updated to this Blob storage account every month.
The issue I'm facing is that I don't know the source for that blob storage. For last month the no data is uploaded, so I don't know where the issue occurred. Is there any possibility to find where is the source for that blob?
I couldn't try anything because I couldn't recognize the problem.
I agree with #Eric Qvarnstrom too much information is missing like SAS tokens and where is the data coming from.
Is there any possibility to find where is the source for that blob? and For last month the no data is uploaded,
AFAIK it is not possible to find where the data is coming from. For that you need to check with Source owners or the Stack holders who are placing files in storage.
Also Check the keys shared with source system are expired and if no data is uploaded check with that source data team are they facing any issues in uploading new data this month.
I would suggest you set alerts rule to track the Create/Update Storage Account (Storage Accounts) to notify you next time.
As Shown in below images Under Monitoring blade select Alerts> Create> Alert Rule.
After selecting Create an alert rule under scope select your storage account and under condition select Create/Update Storage Account (Storage Accounts) as shown below.
Refer this MS document to create a new alert rule.
I've searched the web and contacted technical support yet no one seems to be able to give me a straight answer on whether items in Azure Blob Storage are backed up or not.
What I mean is, do I need to create a twin storage account as a "backup" and program copies of all content from one storage to another, or are the contents of a client's Blob Storage automatically redundantly backed up by Microsoft?
I know with AWS, storage is redundantly backed up via onsite drives as well as across other nodes in the cluster.
do I need to create a twin storage account as a "backup" and program
copies of all content from one storage to another, or are the contents
of a client's Blob Storage automatically redundantly backed up by
Microsoft?
Yes, you will need to do backup manually. Azure Storage does not back up the contents of your storage account automatically.
Azure Storage does provide geo-redundant replication (provided you configure the redundancy level for your storage account as GRS or RA-GRS) but that is not back up. Once you delete content from your primary account (location, it will automatically be removed from secondary account (geo-redundant location).
Both AWS (EBS) and Azure(Blob Storage) options provides durability by replicating the data across different data centers. This is for the high availability and durability of the data to provide the guarantee by the cloud provider.
In order to ensure that your data is durable, Azure Storage has the
ability to keep (and manage) multiple copies of your data. This is
called replication, or sometimes redundancy. When you set up your
storage account, you select a replication type. In most cases, this
setting can be modified after the storage account is set up.
For more details refer the replication section in documentation.
If you need to capture changes to the storage and allow restore to previous versions (e.g In situations like data corruption or application feature requirements like restore points, backups), you need to take a SnapShot manually. This is common for both AWS and Azure.
For more details on creating a Snapshot of Blob in Azure refer the documentation.
Currently, I have a large set of text files which contain (historical) raw data from various sensors. New files are received and processed every day. I'd like to move this off of an on-premises solution to the cloud.
Would Azure's Blob storage be an appropriate mechanism for this volume of small(ish) private files? or is there another Azure solution that I should be pursuing?
Relevent Data (no pun intended) & Requirements-
The data set contains a millions files of mostly small files, for a total of near 400gb. The average file size is around 50kb, but some files could exceed 40mb.
I need to maintain the existing data set for posterity's sake.
New files would be uploaded daily, and then processed once. Processing would be handled by Background Workers reading files off a queue.
Certain files would be downloaded / reviewed / reprocessed after the initial processing.
Let me elaborate more on David's comments.
As David mentioned, there's no limit on number of objects (files) that you can store in Azure Blob Storage. The limit is of the size of the storage account which currently is 500TB. As long as you stay in this limit you will be good. Further, you can have 100 storage accounts in an Azure Subscription so essentially the amount of data that you will be able to store is practically limitless.
I do want to mention one more thing though. It seems that the files that are uploaded in blob storage are once processed and then kind of archived. For this I suggest you take a look at Azure Cool Blob Storage. It is essentially meant for this purpose only where you want to store objects that are not frequently accessible yet when you need those objects they are accessible almost immediately. The advantage of using Cool Blob Storage is that writes and storage is cheaper as compared to Hot Blob Storage accounts however the reads are expensive (which makes sense considering their intended use case).
So a possible solution would be to save the files in your Hot Blob Storage accounts. Once the files are processed, they are moved to Cool Blob Storage. This Cool Blob Storage account can be in the same or different Azure Subscription.
I'm guessing it CAN be used as a file system, is the right (best) tool for the job.
Yes, Azure Blobs Storage can be used as cloud file system.
The data set contains a millions files of mostly small files, for a total of near 400gb. The average file size is around 50kb, but some files could exceed 40mb.
As David and Gaurav Mantri mentioned, Azure Blob Storage could meet this requirement.
I need to maintain the existing data set for posterity's sake.
Data in Azure Blob Storage is durable. You could reference the SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS of Storage.
New files would be uploaded daily, and then processed once. Processing would be handled by Background Workers reading files off a queue.
You can use Azure Function to do the file processing work. Since it will do once a day, you could add a TimerTrigger Function.
//This function will be executed once a day
public static void TimerJob([TimerTrigger("0 0 0 * * *")] TimerInfo timerInfo)
{
//write the processing job here
}
Certain files would be downloaded / reviewed / reprocessed after the initial processing.
Blobs can be downloaded or updated at anytime you want.
In addition, if your data processing job is very complicated, you also could store your data in Azure Data Lake Store and do the data processing job using Hadoop analytic frameworks such as MapReduce or Hive. Microsoft Azure HDInsight clusters can be provisioned and configured to directly access data stored in Data Lake Store.
Here are the differences between Azure Data Lake Store and Azure Blob Storage.
Comparing Azure Data Lake Store and Azure Blob Storage
I am working with a program which connects to multiple APIs, the logs for each operation (HTML/XML/Json) need to be stored for possible later review. Is it feasible to store each request/reply in an Azure blob? There can be hundreds of requests per second (all of which need storing) which vary in size and have an average size of 100kB.
Because the logs need to be searchable (by metadata) my plan is to store it in Azure Blob and put metadata (with blob locations, custom application-related request and content identifiers, etc) in an easily-searchable database.
You can store logs in the Azure table storage or Blob storage but Microsoft itself recommends using Blob storage. Azure Storage Analytics stores log data in Blob storage.
This 'Azure Storage Table Design Guide' points out several draw backs of using table storage for logs and also provides details on how to use the blob storage to store logs. Read the 'Log data anti-pattern' section in particular for this use case.
I'm need to store some temporary files may be 1 to 3 months. Only need to keep the last three months files. Old files need to be deleted. How can I do this in azure blob storage? Is there any other option in this case other than blob storage?
IMHO best option to store files in Azure is either Blob Storage or File Storage however both of them don't support auto expiration of content (based on age or some other criteria).
This feature has been requested long back for Blobs Storage but unfortunately no progress has been made so far (https://feedback.azure.com/forums/217298-storage/suggestions/7010724-support-expiration-auto-deletion-of-blobs).
You could however write something of your own to achieve this. It's rather very simple: Periodically (say once in a day) your program will fetch the list of blobs and compare the last modified date of the blob with current date. If the last modified date of the blob is older than the desired period (1 or 3 months like you mentioned), you simply delete the blob.
You can use WebJobs, Azure Functions or Azure Automation to schedule your code to run on a periodic basis. In fact, there's readymade code available to you if you want to use Azure Automation Service: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Remove-Storage-Blobs-that-aae4b761.
As I know, Azure Blob is a appropriate approach for you to storage some temporary files. For your scenario, I assumed that there is no in-build option for you to delete the old files, and you need to programmatically or manually delete your temporary files.
For a simple way, you could try to upload your blob(file) with the specific format (e.g. https://<your-storagename>.blob.core.windows.net/containerName/2016-11/fileName or https://<your-storagename>.blob.core.windows.net/2016-11/fileName), then you could manually manage your files via Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer.
Also, you could check your files and delete the old files before you uploading the new temporary file. For more details, you could follow storage-blob-dotnet-store-temp-files and override the method CleanStorageIfReachLimit to implement your logic for deleting blobs(files).
Additionally, you could leverage a scheduled Azure WebJob to clean your blobs(files).
You can use Azure Cool Blob Storage.
It is cheaper than Blob storage and is more suitable for archives.
You can store your less frequently accessed data in the Cool access tier at a low storage cost (as low as $0.01 per GB in some regions), and your more frequently accessed data in the Hot access tier at a lower access cost.
Here is a document that explains its features:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-azure-cool-storage/