Does anyone know of a free service that provides public hosting of XML schemas? I just want to be able to upload an XSD file so they can be publicly accessed to validate against and be reasonably confident that the URL will be available for the long term.
Seems like a natural given the intention of schemas, but I can't find anything of the sort.
Of course XSD can be hosted on any publicly accessible web server, but I'm really looking for a dedicated service for XSD hosting: for instance, something that would index the XSD, make them searchable, taggable, etc.
An xsd is just a file, so you could use any hosting service, most are free for public and/or "small" (e.g. <2GB) storage: github, bitbucket, google appengine, heroku, dropbox
Related
I heard a lot that Azure Web Applications uploaded content such as images or any files should be stored in Azure Storage service, not in the app File System.
But I would like to keep the solution simple and store those files into local file system.
Does storing images or any files on the application's local file system hampers somehow the application deployment with more than one instance?
After researching a lot, I understand that, unlike Amazon Beanstalk, all instances of a Web App share the same file storage. despite of ecah apps runs into a different VM, they file system is the same.
The best way to think about it is that all the instances of your app map to the same network drive share that have your files.
when you spin up 2 or more instances the files in the file are using that same storage based file system even if you only have one instance.
You can see that easily by dropping a file (e.g. via FTP), and seeing it reflected instantly in all instances.
Sources: Microsoft, This question and this question
By storing files on the Web application, you're limiting your ability to scale.
The web server/app should do one thing: process your request and output the HTML. Everything else should be handled elsewhere if you truly want to take advantage of cloud computing. So for this instance you should store any files off the web app.
Now if you want to keep this as simple as possible and you're not overly concerned with achieving scale, there's really nothing wrong with your approach. It's my understanding that Web Apps, don't actually spin up new virtual machines for you, or if they do, they replicate exactly what is on the VM. For instance think about this -- if you had all your files stored on one VM and you spun up two new ones, you'd have to copy all those files over to the next two, and now you'd have to create a way to sync all the uploaded files among all your VMs.
I don't actually think you'd run into this problem with Azure Web Apps, but it i a problem that can arise if you're handling the VMs yourself or through an auto-scaling policy. You'll definitely run into the issue if you decide to spin up new web apps in different regions (Say the Ireland region to your EU customers get better performance - you'd now have two different locations where files could be uploaded to and you'd need to sync them as opposed to uploading them to Azure storage all along and keepin them centrally located)
I have made a static website (HTML, CSS, Javascript) which i would like to deploy to Azure. Is there another choice for a static website on Azure rather than Web App. I mean if we consider pricing what choice have i got? And why i should choose it?
You can also have a free webapp (No custom domains or shared for 4.99 per month) and deploy using FTP.
If you really do only have static content, you can just upload it to a blob storage. With containers, you have to option to mimic folders (and also with the actual file names), you can have backups, replication and so on. You can even attach custom domains to the blob store. And compared to a Web App, they are a lot cheaper.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/
[Edit after almost two years :) ]
So I guess I was a little too quick to jump to answering this question back then. As the comments pointed out, there was no "default document" when using blob storage. But now there is: Static website hosting is in preview for blobs. Check out the documentation here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blob-static-website
I have a very special requirement which is:
Two web roles accessing a local shared file location.
I am aware of the "Local Storage" role settings, but those are only accessible within each role scope.
Does anyone know another option to accomplish this?
------- EDIT --------
As suggested I will explain more clearly what I'm trying to achieve here.
I'm implementing Only Office which is a web editor for office files. Their product requires to have a file saved on the file system to be opened on the editor.
I don't want to mix their ASP.NET MVC open source project with my code, so that's why I want to deploy their website as a separate webrole.
-------- END EDIT ------------
Thanks
In your question, you state that (my emphasis):
I'm implementing Only Office which is a web editor for office files. Their product requires to have a file saved on the file system to be opened on the editor.
If Only Office's requirement is to have temporary file storage that is used while the document is being edited, you may be able to get away with this in a Cloud Service Web Role. This is assuming that your users wouldn't be too angry if the temp. working document was 'lost' during a role re-start.
Web (and Worker) Roles are non-durable and the Azure Service Fabric might bounce them if they need to patch the underlying host or they might just crash due to a fault (which is usually why you deploy them in pairs - fault-tolerance etc.) If you save something to the file system on a Web Role, you are not guaranteed that it will be there if the role is bounced.
If however you need durability, you will need to implement something based around Azure Blob Storage and possibly something based on Blob Leases. However I imagine that Only Office doesn't have an implementation for Azure....
Failing that, you could try running on Azure Web App Service, however I imagine you would have the same issue re. backing storage and would need to implement something on Blob Storage.
So, finally, if you want complete control and something akin to running on-premise, take a look at using an IaaS Virtual Machine where you have all of the file system to play-with as you please.
==UPDATE==
Taking a look at the Only Office website, there is a SaaS offering Only Office SaaS Hosting which is probably cheaper to run for a year than the time taken for me to write this answer!
Failing that, if you look at the requirements for Only Office Document Server there is no way you're going to run that on a Web Role. Go Azure IaaS VM's.
You basically have 2 options here, both mentioned in the comments. You can use BLOB storage, or you can use an SMB share using Azure Files, which I believe is in preview still. We have used Azure files to mount an SMB share on several linux boxes. One thing we have noticed is that it is not particularly fast. It is also built on top of blob storage. Here is a link to Azure Files https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/storage-dotnet-how-to-use-files/.
If you choose to use blob storage and you will need to consider concurrency.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/managing-concurrency-in-microsoft-azure-storage-2/
I would suggest to use Azure File Services, you could have a share like URI to be used.
take a look at this:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/storage-dotnet-how-to-use-files/
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.
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.