I can't seem to find any reference to bulk uploading data to azure.
I have a document store with 650,000 pdf document that take up about 1.2 TB of disk space.
Uploading those files to Azure via the web will be difficult. Is there a way I can mail a hard drive and have your team upload them for me?
If not can you recommend the best way to upload this many documents?
Maybe not the answer you expected, but you could use Amazon's AWS Import/Export (this allows you to mail them a HDD and they'll import it in your S3 account).
To transfer the data to a Windows Azure Storage Account you can leverage one of the new features in the 1.7.1 SDK: the StartCopyFromBlob method. This method allows you to copy a file at a specific url in an asynchronous way (you could use this to copy all files from your S3 to your Azure storage account).
Read the following blogpost for a fully working example: How to Copy a Bucket from Amazon S3 to Windows Azure Blob Storage using “Copy Blob”
While Azure doesn't offer a physical ingestion process today, if you talk nicely to the Azure team they can do this as a one off. If you like I can get a contact on the product team for you (dave at greenbutton dot com).
Alternatively there are solutions such as Aspera which provide for accelerated data transfers over UDP and is being beta test in Azure along with the Azure Media Services offering.
We have some tools that help with this as well http://www.greenbutton.com and leverage Aspera's technology.
As disk shipment are not supported by Windows Azure, your best bet is use a 3rd party application (or write your own one) which supports parallel upload. This way you can still upload much faster. 3rd party applications like Gladinet, Cloudberry could be used for upload the data but I am not sure how configurable they are to get maximum parallel upload to achieve fastest upload.
If you decide to write by yourself here is the starting point: Asynchronous Parallel Block Blob Transfers with Progress Change Notification
I know this is a bit too late for the OP, but in the Azure Management Portal, under Storage, pick your storage instance, then click the Import/Export link at the top. At the bottom of that screen, there is a "Create Import Job" link and icon. Also, if you click the blue help icon on the far right side, it says this:
You can use the Windows Azure Import/Export service to transfer large amounts of file data to Windows Azure Blob storage in situations where uploading over the network is prohibitively expensive or infeasible. You can also use the Import/Export service to transfer large quantities of data resident in Blob storage to your on-premises installations in a timely and cost-effective manner. Use the Windows Azure Import/Export Service to Transfer Data to Blob Storage
To transfer a large set of file data into Blob storage, you can send one or more hard drives containing that data to a Microsoft data center, where your data will be uploaded to your storage account. Similarly, to export data from Blob storage, you can send empty hard drives to a Microsoft data center, where the Blob data from your storage account will be copied to your hard drives and then returned to you. Before you send in a drive that contains data, you'll encrypt the data on the drive; when Microsoft exports your data to send to you, the data will also be encrypted before shipping.
Both windows azure storage powershell and azcopy could bulk upload data to azure.
For azure storage powershell, you could use ls -File -Recurse | Set-AzureStorageBlobContent -Container upload.
You can refer http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn408487.aspx for more details.
For azcopy, you can refer this article http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2012/12/03/azcopy-uploading-downloading-files-for-windows-azure-blobs.aspx
Related
I want to spike whether azure and the cloud is a good fit for us.
We have a website where users upload documents to our currently hosted website.
Every document has an equivalent record in a database.
I am using terraform to create the azure infrastructure.
What is my best way of migrating the documents from the local file path on the server to azure?
Should I be using file storage or blob storage. I am confused about the difference.
Is there anything in terraform that can help with this?
Based on your comments, I would recommend storing them in Blob Storage. This service is suited for storing and serving unstructured data like files and images. There are many other features like redundancy, archiving etc. that you may find useful in your scenario.
File Storage is more suitable in Lift-and-Shift kind of scenarios where you're moving an on-prem application to the cloud and the application writes data to either local or network attached disk.
You may also find this article useful: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-decide-blobs-files-disks
UPDATE
Regarding uploading files from local computer to Azure Storage, there are actually many options available:
Use a Storage Explorer like Microsoft's Storage Explorer.
Use AzCopy command-line tool.
Use Azure PowerShell Cmdlets.
Use Azure CLI.
Write your own code using any available Storage Client libraries or directly consuming REST API.
I want to automate the transfer of files from a website not hosted in Azure to my client’s premises.
I am considering having an API on the website send the files to Azure Blob Storage , and then having another API running at the client site, download them.
Both would make use of the Azure storage API, which I like because it is easy to implement.
The files do not need to stay in Azure and can be deleted from storage once they are downloaded.
However I am wondering if there is a faster way.
Should I be using Hot Blob Storage or File Storage perhaps?
I looked at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blob-storage-tiers but am still unclear as to the fastest method for my use case.
I suggest you can use File share, which can be mapped to local as a mapped drive and can be easily and faster operation like read / delete.
If you choose code only, from the comparison of blob and file, they can be up to Up to 60 MiB/s, I cannot see which is faster. There is a Azure Storage Data Movement Library , which is designed for high-performance uploading, downloading and copying Azure Storage Blob and File, you can use it for your purpose.
I would recommend blob storage for this application. Logic apps can also be used to automate this pipeline based on timer triggers or some other trigger.
I need to copy containers in Blob Storage across regions and wanted a solution that would do it without having to download locally and then upload it again. For example, I am trying to copy a container from East US to a container in SouthEast Asia. I used AzCopy to do that and the throughput I got was 22 Mb/s at best. I am not doing /SyncCopy either so is this best throughput the tool provides cross region ? Do we any other external tools that provide faster results ? Thanks.
Azcopy is your best bet when it comes to rapid data move within Azure. You could also consider using Azure Import/Export service if you have an urgent timeline for large amount of data transfer:
using Azure Import/Export service to securely transfer large amounts of data to Azure Blob storage and Azure Files by shipping disk drives to an Azure data center. This service can also be used to transfer data from Azure storage to hard disk drives and ship to your on-premise sites. Data from a single internal SATA disk drive can be imported either to Azure Blob storage or Azure Files.
There are also some external tools:
https://www.signiant.com/signiant-flight-for-fast-large-file-transfers-to-azure-blob-storage/
and:
http://asperasoft.com/fast-file-transfer-with-aspera-sod-azure/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-import-export-service
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-moving-data
I have a web app that is hosted in Azure; one of it's functionalities is to be able to make a few cuts from the video(generate 2 or 3 small videos of 5-10 seconds from a larger video).
The videos are persisted in Azure Blob Storage.
How do you suggest to accomplish this in the Azure environment?
The actual cutting of the videos will be initiated by a web job. I'm also concerned about the pricing(within the Azure environment), I'm taking into account the possibility of high traffic.
Any feedback is appreciated.
Thank you.
Assuming you have video-cutting code that operates on files through normal I/O: You'd need to download the video file from blob, process it via code (or whatever library you've employed), and then store the result back in blob storage. You cannot reference a blob directly with normal standard IO libraries.
If, however, videos are stored in Azure File storage (which is an SMB layer on top of blob storage, then you will be able to directly manipulate your video files.
Web Jobs run within an App Service (just like Web Apps), so you have access to a certain amount of local disk space (depending on App Service tier) for use. You should have no problem temporarily storing a video file within your web app's disk space, for editing operations.
You asked about cost: Again, assuming you're talking about running code within a Web Job (app service), you're just paying for whatever App Service tier you've chosen.
How you actually do those edit operations is entirely up to you (language, library, etc).
Azure Blob Storage is simply an object store which stores the data. It does not have the capability you're looking for.
Azure Media Service however is the service you should look into. The media served by this service makes use of Azure Blob Storage.
For editing video, may I suggest you take a look at Video Editor Plugin for Azure Media Player. You can read more about this plugin here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/blog/video-editor-plugin/. You can also try it out here: http://ampdemo.azureedge.net/amp_editor.html.
I want to write the output of pipeline to an FTP folder. ADF seems to support on-premises file but not FTP folder.
How can I write the output in text format to an FTP folder?
Unfortunately FTP Servers are not a supported data store for ADF as of right now. Therefore there is no OOTB way to interact with an FTP Server for either reading or writing.
However, you can use a custom activity to make it possible, but it will require some custom development to make this happen. A fellow Cloud Solution Architect within MS put together a blog post that talks about how he did it for one of his customers. Please take a look at the following:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/cloud_solution_architect/2016/07/02/creating-ftp-data-movement-activity-for-azure-data-factory-pipeline/
I hope that this helps.
Upon thinking about it you might be able to achieve what you want in a mildly convoluted way by writing the output to a Azure Blob storage account and then either
1) manually: downloading and pushing the file to the "FTP" site from the Blob storage account or
2) automatically: using Azure CLI to pull the file locally and then push it to the "FTP" site with a batch or shell script as appropriate
As a lighter weight approach to custom activities (certainly the better option for heavy work).
You may wish to consider using azure functions to write to ftp (note there is a time out when using a consumption plan - not in other plans, so it will depend on how big the files are).
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/functions-create-storage-blob-triggered-function
You could instruct data factory to write to a intermediary blob storage.
And use blob storage triggers in azure functions to upload them as soon as they appear in blob storage.
Or alternatively, write to blob storage. And then use a timer in logic apps to upload from blob storage to ftp. Logic Apps hide a tremendous amount of power behind there friendly exterior.
You can write a Logic app that will pick your file up from Azure storage and send it to an FTP site. Then call the Logic App using a Data Factory Web Activity.
Make sure you do some error handling in your Logic app to return 400 if the ftp fails.