Creating large blob out of small blobs in Azure - azure

I have a large number of tiny blob files created by Azure Application Insights Service.
I would like to combine these blob files and create 1 blob file per hour. This is because we have data on-premises that I would like to integrate this data with and I wouldn't want to download millions of small blob files.
My question is what Azure Service I can use for this?

Related

azureml register datastore file share or blob storage

I have a folder called data with a bunch of csvs (about 80), file sizes are fairly small. This data is clean and has already been preprocessed. I want to upload this data folder and register as a datastore in azureml. Which would be best for this scenario data store created with file share or a data store created with blob storage?
AFAIK, based on your scenario you can make use of Azure File Share to create data store.
Please note that, Azure Blob storage is suitable for uploading large amount of unstructured data whereas Azure File Share is suitable for uploading and processing the structured files in chunks (more interaction with app to share files).
I have a folder called data with a bunch of csvs (about 80), file sizes are fairly small. This data is clean and has already been preprocessed.
As you mentioned CSV data is clean and preprocessed it comes under structured data. So, you can make you of Azure File Share to create data store.
To register a data store with Azure File Share you can make use of this MsDoc
To know more about Azure File Share and Azure Blob storage, please find below links:
Azure Blob Storage or Azure File Storage by Mike
azureml.data.azure_storage_datastore.AzureFileDatastore class - Azure Machine Learning Python | Microsoft Docs

Logic Apps - Get Blob Content Using Path

I have a event driven logic app (blob event) which reads a block blob using the path and uploads the content to Azure Data Lake. I noticed the logic app is failing with 413 (RequestEntityTooLarge) reading a large file (~6 GB). I understand that logic apps has the limitation of 1024 MB - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/azureblob/ but is there any work around to handle this type of situation? The alternative solution I am working on is moving this step to Azure Function and get the content from the blob. Thanks for your suggestions!
If you want to use an Azure function, I would suggest you to have a look at this at this article:
Copy data from Azure Storage Blobs to Data Lake Store
There is a standalone version of the AdlCopy tool that you can deploy to your Azure function.
So your logic app will call this function that will run a command to copy the file from blob storage to your data lake factory. I would suggest you to use a powershell function.
Another option would be to use Azure Data Factory to copy file to Data Lake:
Copy data to or from Azure Data Lake Store by using Azure Data Factory
You can create a job that copy file from blob storage:
Copy data to or from Azure Blob storage by using Azure Data Factory
There is a connector to trigger a data factory run from logic app so you may not need azure function but it seems that there is still some limitations:
Trigger Azure Data Factory Pipeline from Logic App w/ Parameter
You should consider using Azure Files connector:https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/azurefile/
It is currently in preview, the advantage it has over Blob is that it doesn't have a size limit. The above link includes more information about it.
For the benefit of others who might be looking for a solution of this sort.
I ended up creating an Azure Function in C# as the my design dynamically parses the Blob Name and creates the ADL structure based on the blob name. I have used chunked memory streaming for reading the blob and writing it to ADL with multi threading for adderssing the Azure Functions time out of 10 minutes.

Limits on File Count for Azure Blob Storage

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

Is Azure Blob storage the right place to store many (small) communication logs?

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.

How to achieve Incremental deployment of Blob Files storage files to different environments of windows azure storage?

We are new to Windows azure and are developing a web application. In the beginning of the project , we have deployed complete code to different environments which actually publish complete code and uploaded blob objects to azure storage as we linked sitefinity to hold blob objects in azure storage . But now as we are in the middle of development , we are just required to upload any new blob files created which can be quite less in numbers (1 or 2 or maybe few).Now I would like to know best process to sync these blob files to different azure storage environments which is for each cloud service. So ideally we would like to update staging cloud service and staging storage first and then test there and then once no bugs are found, then will be required to update UAT and production storages as well with the changed or new blob objects.
Please help.
You can use the Azure Storage Explorer to manually upload/download blobs from storage accounts very easily. For one or two blobs, this would be an easy solution, otherwise you will need to write a tool that connects to the blob storage via an API and does the copying for you.

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