I have a requirement where I need to transfer files from one blob to the other through vnets deployed in different geographies and connected to each other. As I am very new to Azure platform, I tried researching over the web but could not find any proper solution. I got a suggestion that I can achieve this through programming an app service. Please let me know how I can achieve this.
Depends on your scenario, here are options:
To perform a backup of the storage account across different gegions, you can just specify the replication parameter (while creating a new storage account) to one these values:
Geo-redundant storage
Read-access geo-redundant storage
Another article on HA applications:
Designing Highly Available Applications using RA-GRS
If you want to manually copy files from a storage account to another, you can use Azure Storage events, it will push an event to Event Grid every time a blob is created.
Reacting to Blob storage events
You can then use a Logic App or a Function App to copy blobs to another storage account.
Related
I have some e-mail attachments being saved to Azure Blob.
I am now trying to write a Azure Functions App that would connect to that blob storage, run some scripts and re-save the file.
However, when selecting a storage account for the function, I couldn't select my blob storage account.
I went on the website and it said this:
When creating a function app, you must create or link to a general-purpose Azure Storage account that supports Blob, Queue, and Table storage. Some storage accounts don't support queues and tables. These accounts include blob-only storage accounts and Azure Premium Storage.
I'm wondering, is there any workaround this? and if not, perhaps any other suggestions? I'm becoming a little lost in all the options, and which one to actually choose.
Thanks!
EDIT: Might I add I writing the function Python
I think you are overlooking the fact that you can have multiple storage accounts. In order for an Azure Function to work you need a storage account. That storage account is used to store runtime information of the Azure Function for internal purposes like state management. This storage account is subject to restrictions as you already found out. There is no workaround for that.
However, if the function you are writing needs to access another storage account it is free to do so. You just have to provide details to connect to that specific storage account. In that case you also have a clear seperation between the storage account that is used by the azure function for its internal operations and the storage account your application needs to connect and which you have total control about withouth having to worry that you break things by deleting internal used blobs/tables/queues.
You can have a blob triggered function that gets triggered when changes occur on your specific blob storage. That doesn't need to be the storage account that the azure function internally uses, which is created/selected when creating the azure function.
Here is a sample that shows how to add a blob triggered azure function in Python. MyStorageAccountAppSetting refers to an app setting that holds the connection string to the storage account that you use for storage.
The snippet from the website you are quoting is for storing the function app code itself and any related modules. It does not pertain to what your function can access when the code of your function executes.
When your function executes it will need to use the Azure Blob Storage SDK/modules to connect to your blob storage account and read the email attachments. Here's a quickstart guide for using Azure Storage with Python: Quickstart with Azure Storage Blobs SDK for Python
General-purpose v2 storage accounts support the latest Azure Storage features and incorporate all of the functionality of general-purpose v1 and Blob storage accounts here
There are more integration options with GPv2 accounts including Azure Function Triggers. See: Azure Blob storage bindings for Azure Functions
Further refer: Types of storage accounts
If Blob, based on your need, you can choose an access tier based on the frequency of access for the data (e-mail attachments)Access tiers for Azure Blob Storage - hot, cool, and archive. If General purpose storage account, its standard performance tier.
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.
When working with a VHD hosted within an Azure Storage account, are there any operations one can perform to access the Storage account directly?
I.e. I create a VM and store it's VHD in a blob in account A, are there any local/efficient ways to work with data in account A from the VM?
See if Azure Storage Files service will work for you. You may attach your storage as a file share and communicate with that directly using traditional APIs.
Apart of that, you may use cross-platform Azure Storage Explorer for communicating with other Storage subservices like Blobs.
I want to create a couple of cloud services - Int, QA, and Prod. Each of these will connect to separate Db's.
Do these cloud services require "storage accounts"? Conceptually the cloud services have executables and they must be physically located somewhere.
Note: I do not use any blobs/queues/tables.
If so, must I create 3 separate storage accounts or link them up to one?
Storage accounts are more like storage namespaces - it has a url and a set of access keys. You can use storage from anywhere, whether from the cloud or not, from one cloud service or many.
As #sharptooth pointed out, you need storage for diagnostics with Cloud Services. Also for attached disks (Azure Drives for cloud services), deployments themselves (storing the cloud service package and configuration).
Storage accounts are free: That is, create a bunch, and still only pay for consumption.
There are some objective reasons why you'd go with separate storage accounts:
You feel that you could exceed the 20,000 transaction/second advertised limit of a single storage account (remember that storage diagnostics are using some of this transaction rate, which is impacted by your logging-aggressiveness).
You are concerned about security/isolation. You may want your dev and QA folks using an entirely different subscription altogether, with their own storage accounts, to avoid any risk of damaging a production deployment
You feel that you'll exceed 200TB 500TB (the limit of a single storage account)
Azure Diagnostics uses Azure Table Storage under the hood (and it's more convenient to use one storage account for every service, but it's not required). Other dependencies your service has might also use some of the Azure Storage services. If you're sure that you don't need Azure Storage (and so you don't need persistent storage of data dumped through Azure Diagnostics) - okay, you can go without it.
The service package of your service will be stored and managed by Azure infrastructure - that part doesn't require a storage account.
I'm trying to get up-and-going with Windows Azure. I understand that I need to create a "Storage Account". However, what I'm confused about is, how I should set it up. For instance, my Azure subscription is set to my company name. I intend to have multiple ASP.NET web applications (web roles) associated with my subscription. Each web application will have its own database.
My question is, should each web application have its own storage account? Or should only one storage account be used for all of my projects?
Thank you!
There's no one way to answer this, but here are some thoughts to help your decision:
Each storage account is limited to 100TB. If you feel that you will push the limits of this across multiple websites, then create multiple storage accounts for sure.
To make billing easier, I'd suggest separate storage accounts
Storage accounts have an SLA of a few thousand transactions per second across the entire storage account. For performance purposes, it's probably better to have separate storage accounts
Consider putting your diagnostic data in a separate storage account. This way, you can safely give your Storage Account key to a 3rd-party like ParaLeap (creators of AzureWatch) for monitoring your app, while not giving away the key to real customer data, for instance.
If you need more than 5 storage accounts, you'll need to contact Customer Support to increase this number.
Windows Azure Storage server is for simple blob storage. This is for when your app needs a file store. Any application, not just Azure web roles, can target a storage service. It's kind of like Amazon S3 if you're familiar with that.
Storage services are not required to run Azure applications. You just need a "compute" instance.