As the title says, I'm looking for a way to access an azure files share (in preview) directly from an azure website. I cannot use any REST API or anything like this and I was looking for the possibility of mounting a SMB share directly into the website (through the new portal or any other way).
I found the following links, from which I understand that this is still under review (http://feedback.azure.com/forums/169385-web-apps-formerly-websites/suggestions/6084609-allow-map-azure-file-share-microsoft-azure-file-s) and also a SO question (Can the new Azure File Service be used from Azure WebSites?) that doesn't answer my question.
To be honest and for the sake of giving more details, my scenario is pretty simple - I have some websites and also some virtual machines that should access the files from the azure files service. Regarding the VM, the approach is pretty straight forward and easy but regarding the WebSites, I don't find any way at this moment.
On the other hand, regardless of the answer to the above question, does it make sense to (or do I have the possibility to) enable CDN over an Azure Files Share?
Thank you very much.
As of today, no single technology will serve your purpose. You can't use File Service as you don't have the capability to mount a share in an Azure Website as well as it is not suited for streaming purposes (all access to files there need to be authorized and there's no concept of Shared Access Signature in File Service today).
I guess, you would have to pick one of the two technologies (Blob Service and File Service) and make some compromises to make it work in both Websites and Virtual Machines.
Assuming you go with File Service, then you can mount them in the Virtual Machine and do the processing on the files there. On the website front, you would need to use Storage Client library to download the relevant files in some folder in your website and stream those files from there.
Assuming you go with Blob Service, then you can simply stream them in your website directly from blob storage (no need to have those files in your website). In the Virtual Machine, when you need to process those files (blobs), you would simply download them to your VM for processing and then re-upload them in blob storage.
Does it make sense to (or do I have the possibility to) enable CDN
over an Azure Files Share?
Currently it is not possible to serve Azure File Service files via CDN.
Related
We have a solution which allows our customers to upload SCORM (http://scorm.com/scorm-explained/) packages which are basically mini websites, just html pages and a predefined javascript interface which allows the packages to talk to our site. This all works fine on a self hosted IIS machine as we build up a folder structure of each SCORM module within the website root and can allow the user to open each one and complete the course.
However these can be quite large, containing multiple videos, etc. and while on a self hosted machine we can place the site on a large hard drive how would this work if we wanted to migrate the solution to azure cloud services. I have read in several places the site must be stateless and the VM can be re-imaged at any time, does that mean that we shouldn't store anything in the folder structure that wasn't part of the original package? Is there a way to configure a shared permanent folder for our websites to use?
In a word BlobStorage!
As you quite rightly point out, Azure VMs are stateless so you need a single, persisted repository for your data / file, and blob storage easily fits the bill.
Without further information on precise requirements or how you explicitly need to reference these files, it's a bit hard to suggest the best way for you. However, here's a couple of things...
This video provides a quick overview of blob storage and retrieving items directly from BlobStorage. If you scenario requires you to serve up or store files on the local machine, this might be a good starting point.
BlobStorage supports direct access over HTTP and HTTPS, so you may want to simply reference files directly from BlobStorage (something that shouldn't be a problem as they're web assets). Check out the HTTP section in this article for the URL format. Note: you can also secure up these blob using SharedAccessSignatures if you want to restrict access.
There's no reason why you cannot use a standard VM then map a network drive using the Microsoft Azure File Service. I can't say I've personally done this, I used something else, but the concept a shared resource existing in BlobStorage is very doable.
HTH
We are looking at migrating some sites from Azure Cloud Services to Azure Websites (as that is how things seem to be going). Cloud services obviously we were told specifically didn't preserve the file system state as they were re-deployed on machine failure.
I am assuming websites are built on Blob storage. Is there a page from Microsoft that confirms if I upload files to the site via FTP etc. that they are persistent, backed up and preserved as part of the site? If they are persistent what are their SLAs? Is there any inbuilt function to backup local files? What happens on instance scale out to files on local file system? Can I get access to the underlying blob storage?
If they are standard is there any issues with letting users upload files in a hosting sense? I appreciate risks of what users shouldn't upload. If files are persistent is it sill best practice to offload to blob storage?
Yes, files that are part of your Web Site are persisted. You can access them via FTP.
You can use the backup service (currently in preview) to schedule backups to blob storage.
The Azure Web Sites SLA is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39303
I'm trying to find the best setup for my website on Windows Azure.
I have a front-end and a back-end website made in ASP.NET MVC4.
Both websites must use a shared same images. Font-end for displaying, back-end for CRUD actions. The image files are stored in a folder in the front-end web application and the url's to those images are stored in a mysql database.
Currenty i have 2 Windows Azure websites, but i can't access the images from the back-end website because there are stored in a folder on the front-end application?
What's the best setup and cheapest for this type of application?
2 websites with shared BLOB storage ?
A cloud service containing 2 webroles (front- and back-end) ?
... ?
Thanks
First you should not use web application's folder beside temporary operations. Since Azure means multi-computer environment, resource (image) won't be available for requester if you use more than one instance (machine)
I would go on 2 blob container. (not 2 blob storage account)
We do not have IP based restriction on blobs yet so as long as you don't share those addresses you will be fine. If you really need to have restriction you can use Shared Access Policy which you can find more details on Use a Stored Access Policy also you should review this one too Restrict Access to Containers and Blobs
I think that using a shared blob storage account is the right direction.
Using a local folder is not a good idea - on web sites and cloud services these are not persistent and you may lose your files. Either way - this is not a scalable solutions - if you'll add additional instances in the future you will not have access to the files.
Using blob storage will give you a location that is accessible from both locations and indeed from the client's browser directly.
You do not specify whether the images need to be accessed securely from the front end or not, if not that blob storage is particularly useful as they can be served from a public container on azure storage directly.
I am using Windows Azure for a custom blog implementation. The blog uses CKEditor and the CKFinder file management plugin. Typically the file management plugin connects to a file system directory to store the files. I need to store these as if it was a local directory and serve them through HTTP requests. In Azure you cannot rely on the file system to maintain through recycles.
I assume you are to use Azure Storage, but am at a loss as to how to do this. Is there a way to "mount" these storage systems to the file system? Am I correct in my assumptions to use storage? If not any guidance as to what I am missing?
Thanks
Or, you could use AzureBlobDrive to mount blob storage as a drive in Azure directly (no VHD, no limitation on only one instance being able to write).
https://github.com/richorama/AzureBlobDrive
You can actually mount a page blob as an NTFS drive, which is then a "durable drive" (just like any other blob), and you access it via a drive letter, just like a locally-attached (but volatile) drive.
The issue is that, using mounted drives, you may only have one writer, so this might cause challenges when scaling to multiple instances.
Take a look at this MSDN post to see an example of mounting a drive. Notice that, while the example doesn't set up any cache, you can specify a cache size. The cache is stored on a local disk resource.
EDIT: For a tutorial, download the Windows Azure Training Kit. Go to hands-on labs, and open Exploring Windows Azure Storage. Check out Exercise 4: Working with Drives.
I have a build script that it would be very useful to configure to dump some files into Azure blob storage so they can be picked up by my Azure web role.
My preferred plan was to find some way of mounting the blob storage on my build server as a mapped drive and simply using Robocopy copy to copy the files over. This will involve the least ammount of friction as I already am deploying some files like this to other web servers using WebDrive.
I found a piece of software that will allow me to do that: http://www.gladinet.com/
However on further investigation I found that it needs port 80 to run without some hairy looking hacking about on the server.
So is there another piece of software I could use or perhaps another way I haven't considered, such as deploying the files to a local folder that is automagically synced with blob storage?
Update in response to #David Makogon
I am using http://waacceleratorumbraco.codeplex.com/ this performs 2 way synchronisation between the blob storage and the web roles. I have tested this with http://cloudberrylab.com/ and I can deploy files manually to the blob and they are deployed correctly to the web roles. Also I have done the reverse and updated files in the web roles which have then been synced back to the blob and I have subsequently edited/downloaded them from blob storage.
What I'm really looking for is a way to automate the cloudberry side of things. So I don't have a manual step to copy a few files over. I will investigate the Powershell solutions in the meantime.
I know this is an old post - but in case someone else comes here... the answer is now "yes". I've been working on a CodePlex project to do exactly that. (All source code is available).
http://azuredrive.codeplex.com/
If you're comfortable using powershell in your build process then you could use the Cerebrata Cmdlets to upload the files. If that doesn't work for you, you could write a custom activity (but this sounds quite a bit more involved).
Mounting a cloud drive from a non-Windows Azure compute instance (e.g. your local build machine) is not supported.
Having said that: Even if you could mount a Cloud Drive from your build machine, your compute instances would need access to it too, and there can only be one writer. If your compute instances only needed read-only access, they'd need to create a snapshot after you upload new files.
This really doesn't sound like a good idea though. As knightpfhor suggested, the Cerebrata cmdlets provide this capability (look at Import-File). This allows you to push individual files into their own blobs. You can optimize further by pushing a single ZIP file into a blob. You can then use a technique similar to the one described by Nate Totten in his multi-tenant web role sample, to detect new zip files and expand them to your local storage. Nate's blog post is here.
Oh, and if you don't want to use the Cerebrata cmdlets, you can upload blobs directly with the Windows Azure Storage REST API (though the cmdlets are very simple to use and integrate seamlessly with PowerShell).