I'm developing a webapp in nodejs that require the upload of some media and
I'm deciding if using Google Drive or Box as storage for static media of my app.
Both solutions use oauth2 for authentication, but I can't understand how to connect my node app to a single account (where the storage must be). The problem is that I can't find in their documentation an example that fit my problem.
What I have to do to implements this?
If it's not possible what are good cloud storage alternatives that offers free space? I don't want to pay for a service before of a production environment
Unless each user is going to be uploading content to their own Google Drive or Box (which it doesn't appear to be in this case). Both of those options aren't really the right solution to your problem.
If you're simply doing static assets that don't frequently change, just keep them as assets in your project. This would be the right approach for things like logos.
Otherwise you should look into either Amazon Web Service or Google Cloud Services. Both are pretty inexpensive for small amounts of storage. Not sure about Google Cloud, but AWS gives you a small amount of storage for free for the first year. This would be a better solution if you have some web interface that requires you to upload an image, for say a blog.
It all just depends on what you're actually trying to achieve.
Related
I am relatively new to cloud, so please guide me through complete process.
I have an application that will be hosted on containers in cloud environment. I want some temporary storage on the container or the cloud environment, and access it via my web application (written in C#), meaning I will generate a file and keep it there. First of all, is it possible without costing me extra? Secondly, if it is possible, how can I access the area with C# code? And even if it costs me extra, will I have any access issues?? Also, please let me know the limitations of that free space, in terms of storage, accessibility and cost.
Using an App Service you can store temporal files inside %TMP% folder which is maped to %SYSTEMDRIVE%\local\Temp with no extra cost.
Depending on your App Service Plan you will have from 10GB to 140GB free space to store files. Beware, your files will dissapear if App service is restarted.
Refer to this link:
https://github.com/projectkudu/kudu/wiki/Understanding-the-Azure-App-Service-file-system
I'm working on a simple mobile application in order to learn more about app development in general. I'm using Xamarin and C# to make a cross-platform app.
The end goal is to make a listing of users that are willing to be contacted to play golf. I want users to be able to enter their name and email address on one page, save the entries in a table using Azure SQL Database, and then display them in a list on another page in the app.
I've done some pretty extensive research on my own, but now I think it's time to get some real-life interaction to help guide me along. So here's my actual question...
It looks like the "Getting Started" tutorial here is close to what I want to do. But it seems like the database the app in the example uses is stored locally, whereas I want to create a table that all users will be able to access. Is following this walkthrough the right move for me? If not, what should I do instead?
Bear in mind that I'm committed to using Azure Mobile Services, so please refrain from answers suggesting I use a different platform.
Thanks guys!
If you use Azure Storage directly from the client app, then make sure you are not using Shared Key authentication. Otherwise, anyone could simply steal the credentials from the app and get full access to your blob account. To learn more, see Shared Access Signatures and the SO question Azure blob storage and security best practices.
From the official documentation:
Exposing either of your account keys opens your account to the possibility of malicious or negligent use. Shared access signatures provide a safe alternative that allows other clients to read, write, and delete data in your storage account according to the permissions you've granted, and without need for the account key.
For new projects, you should use Azure Mobile Apps instead of Azure Mobile Services. The new service offers a number of features, and it is where all future investments will be.
For instance, there is now support for blob storage syncing along with regular offline data sync, and it uses SAS tokens to connect securely. Here's a tutorial for Xamarin.Forms: Connect to Azure Storage in your Xamarin.Forms app. It includes a sample that you can deploy to your own Azure subscription with one click.
For your specific question, you could modify the Todo sample (or look at the more full-featured Field Engineer sample) and add tables for Players and Games.
There are a number of offering on the Azure platform that will allow you to store your golf players. However, the page you linked to is for BLOB storage, and I would not recommend using that.
There is Azure table storage. Which is a NoSQL store on the Azure platform. It's highly scalable and schema-less, so very flexible. You can leverage the Azure SDK to read and write to it - or go REST if that's what you prefer. Check out the tutorial here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/storage-dotnet-how-to-use-tables/
Then there is Azure SQL, which is SQL server offered on the Azure platform. This is a traditional relational database store, but more scalable ( since it's on the Azure Platform ). You can also use this solution, but it does require a bit of extra work, since you probably want to use an ORM like Entity Framework.
So in all - I would go for Azure table storage. It's really easy to get started with and will do what you want to do.
We plan to migrate the existing website to Windows azure, and i have been told that we need to store files to blob storage.
My questions is:
If we want to use blob storage, that means i need to re-write the file storage function(we use file system for now), call blob service api to store files, that's very strange for me just because we want to use windows azure, how about in the future we want to use Amazon EC2 or other cloud platform, they might have there own way to store file, then may be i need to re-write the file storage function again, in my opinion , the implementation of a project should not depends on the cloud platform(or cloud server)! Can any body correct me, thanks!
I won't address the commentary about whether an app should have a dependency on a particular cloud environment (or specific ways to deal with that particular issue), as that's subjective and it's a nice debate to have somewhere else. What I will address is the actual storage in Azure, as your info is a bit out-of-date.
One reason to use blob storage directly (and possibly the reason you were told to use blob storage) is that it provides access from multiple instances of your app. Also, blob storage provides 500TB of storage per storage account, and it's triple-replicated within the deployed region (and optionally geo-replicated). With attached storage (either with local disk or blob-backed Azure Disk), the access is specific to a particular instance of your app. Shifting from file system access to blob storage access does require app modification.
If you choose not to modify your app's file I/O operations, then you can also consider the new Azure File Service, which provides SMB access to storage (backed by blob storage). Using File Service, your app would (hopefully) not need to be modified, although you might need to change your root path.
More information on Azure File Service may be found here.
Why does it seem strange? You need to store your files somewhere and the cloud is a good a place as any IF it suits your needs. The obvious advantages are redundancy and geo replication, sharing files across multiple projects and servers, The list goes on. It's difficult to advise on whether it would be a good idea or not without hearing some specifics.
You could use windows azure storage with amazon in the future if you wanted to (you'd just need to set up the access for it), obviously with slighter longer delay. Then again that slight performance drop may be significant and you may end up re-writing it.
Most importantly, swapping over from one cloud provider to another is not trivial depending on just how much you use it or how much data you've got in it, so I would strongly suggest looking at the advantages / disadvantages of each platform closely before putting your lot in with either one and then fully learn that platform.
Personally, I went for Azure cloud services + storage etc even though it was slightly more expensive at the time, because i'm a Microsoft Person (not that I didn't do my research). It was annoying in the early days when key features were missing, but it's really matured now and I like the pace that it's improving.
It's cheap to test, why not try both and see which one suits you? A small price to pay when you have big decisions to make.
Disclaimer: I don't know the current state of Amazon web services.
Nice question. We are in the middle of a migration of an old PHP/MySQL/LocalShare to WebRole/SQLAzure/AzureStorage ERP application. We faced the same problem and decision. Let me write some thoughts about the issue :
It is a good option to just be able to switch the storage provider but is it reasonable? You can always build the abstraction but do you plan how to do the actual change of storage provider - migration/sync while in production? What kind of argument will exactly drive the transition to another storage provider? How much users and data do you have? Do you plan to shard-rebalance the storage in the future? How reliable must be this system during this storage provider switch? Do you want to totally move the data when you want to switch or you just want to shard it so that you start using this different provider? Does the cost development of these (reliable) storage layers and the cost of development of reliable transitions (or bi-directional syncs) outweighs the money difference between any two storage providers?
Just switching storage mechanism from Azure Blob to Amazon will incur heavy latency penalty if your other services are on Azure - When you create Storage and Services on Azure you set affinity groups by region so that you minimize the network latency.
These are only a few of the questions to answer before doing all the weightlifting. We have abstracted the file repository (blob) because we planned to move from local NFS to Blob transparently and gradually and it answers our needs.
I've been using the Azure Mobile Service for the last 4 months and I'm very happy with the results.I can create and maintain a backend service with no issues.
The only thing I did not find how to implement is Image Manipulation and Hosting.
My iOS app needs to upload files to the server and the server will resize/crop the images to generate some thumbnails.
Right now Im hosting the images in Amazon s3 and the resizing is done in the client. The problem with is that I need to upload 2 images instead of just one.
What are the options to solve my situation using only the Azure Mobile Services?
For storing images, you could possibly use Azure Blob Storage instead of Amazon S3. One benefit you would get out of it is lower latency between your mobile service and storage.
Coming to your 2nd question, you would need some kind of server side processing to work with the images once they're received at the mobile service end. I've not worked extensively with node.js, but a quick search led me to this thread on SO: Which library should I use for server-side image manipulation on Node.JS?. You could possibly use one of the libraries mentioned there to process the image in mobile service itself and then push both images into storage.
I would like to create a Metro application that allows a group of people to interact. One person would create data and serve as the owner, and multiple others would be invited in and be allow to modify that data. I heard from Build talks that each Metro application will get per-user Azure storage, but will it be possible to share that data between multiple users? Does anyone have a link they could share where I could research this?
I think that you are confusing SkyDrive with Azure Blob Storage.
SkyDrive
Personal to a Live ID
Not really meant as a base for collaborative work
Azure Blob Storage
You can have public files that anyone can view and update
You can have a lease on file that only allows certain people to edit it
Since you own the Azure account you also control the content
You can learn the basics here
If you want to share private app data between users, the best way to do so would be via a shared server of some sort. You should have a server (running on Azure, Amazon EC2, or anything really) that exposes a REST-ful web service which each application connects to. The shared state then lives on that server.
This is better than trying to use skydrive or some file-based system for storing shared data. With a file on skydrive and multiple users trying to access it, you would run into concurrency issues when more than 1 person tries to write to it.
You don't get Azure with Metro.
With Live you get a free SkyDrive that is a personal cloud storage. Like 10 GB. Can share files but it is via sending an email link. It is not file storage that would readily support a server type application to manage that sharing.
Azure is a cloud platform for file and data sharing. Azure is not free but storage cost is only $0.125 / GB per month. 10 GB = $1.25 / month. Using SkyDrive as shared storage you are giving up a lot of developer and hosting tools that come with Azure to save $1.25 / month.
It looks like there is a more formal definition of this with the updated help now available. They were referring to roaming application data. I found the following links that provide guidance:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh464917.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465094.aspx
The general is that a small amount of temporary application data is provided on a per-app, per-user basis. The actual size you get is not detailed, but the guidance is pretty clear - app settings only, no large data sets, and don't use it for instant synchronization. Given this guidance, my plan is not a good one and will change.