I'm trying to get up-and-going with Windows Azure. I understand that I need to create a "Storage Account". However, what I'm confused about is, how I should set it up. For instance, my Azure subscription is set to my company name. I intend to have multiple ASP.NET web applications (web roles) associated with my subscription. Each web application will have its own database.
My question is, should each web application have its own storage account? Or should only one storage account be used for all of my projects?
Thank you!
There's no one way to answer this, but here are some thoughts to help your decision:
Each storage account is limited to 100TB. If you feel that you will push the limits of this across multiple websites, then create multiple storage accounts for sure.
To make billing easier, I'd suggest separate storage accounts
Storage accounts have an SLA of a few thousand transactions per second across the entire storage account. For performance purposes, it's probably better to have separate storage accounts
Consider putting your diagnostic data in a separate storage account. This way, you can safely give your Storage Account key to a 3rd-party like ParaLeap (creators of AzureWatch) for monitoring your app, while not giving away the key to real customer data, for instance.
If you need more than 5 storage accounts, you'll need to contact Customer Support to increase this number.
Windows Azure Storage server is for simple blob storage. This is for when your app needs a file store. Any application, not just Azure web roles, can target a storage service. It's kind of like Amazon S3 if you're familiar with that.
Storage services are not required to run Azure applications. You just need a "compute" instance.
Related
I deployed WorkerRole to Azure Cloud Service (classic) in new portal. With this, I also created Azure Storage account for queue.
Try to add AutoScale rule, the storage account is not listed. Tried to select Other Resource and put Resource Identifier of storage, there's no Metric name listed.
Is it by design that classic Cloud Service and new Storage account not working together?
Storage account data (e.g. blobs, queues, containers, tables) are accessible simply with account name + key. Any app can work with them.
However, to manage/enumerate available storage accounts, there are Classic-created and ARM-created accounts, each with different API's.
The original Azure Service Management (ASM) API doesn't know anything about ARM resources. There's a fairly good chance that, since you're deploying to a Classic cloud service, it's using ASM only and will not be able to enumerate ARM-created storage accounts.
If you create a Classic storage account (which has zero difference in functionality), you should be able to see it as an option for auto-scale.
I have a bit more details on the differences in this answer.
At this time, it is not possible to autoscale anything based on a new "v2" storage account. It has nothing to do with the fact that you are using the classic Azure Cloud Service. I am having the same issue with using Azure App Services. In the end, I just created a classic storage account to use for the autoscaling. There is no difference in how you interact with the different types of storage accounts.
I want to create a couple of cloud services - Int, QA, and Prod. Each of these will connect to separate Db's.
Do these cloud services require "storage accounts"? Conceptually the cloud services have executables and they must be physically located somewhere.
Note: I do not use any blobs/queues/tables.
If so, must I create 3 separate storage accounts or link them up to one?
Storage accounts are more like storage namespaces - it has a url and a set of access keys. You can use storage from anywhere, whether from the cloud or not, from one cloud service or many.
As #sharptooth pointed out, you need storage for diagnostics with Cloud Services. Also for attached disks (Azure Drives for cloud services), deployments themselves (storing the cloud service package and configuration).
Storage accounts are free: That is, create a bunch, and still only pay for consumption.
There are some objective reasons why you'd go with separate storage accounts:
You feel that you could exceed the 20,000 transaction/second advertised limit of a single storage account (remember that storage diagnostics are using some of this transaction rate, which is impacted by your logging-aggressiveness).
You are concerned about security/isolation. You may want your dev and QA folks using an entirely different subscription altogether, with their own storage accounts, to avoid any risk of damaging a production deployment
You feel that you'll exceed 200TB 500TB (the limit of a single storage account)
Azure Diagnostics uses Azure Table Storage under the hood (and it's more convenient to use one storage account for every service, but it's not required). Other dependencies your service has might also use some of the Azure Storage services. If you're sure that you don't need Azure Storage (and so you don't need persistent storage of data dumped through Azure Diagnostics) - okay, you can go without it.
The service package of your service will be stored and managed by Azure infrastructure - that part doesn't require a storage account.
Our team has Windows Azure MSDN - Visual Studio Premium subscriptions for all our devs. I have been taking advantage of the $100 per month allowance and am building more infrastructure in the cloud.
However, I would like other members of our team to access certain of the assets. I am quite new to the Azure infrastructure, so this might be a dumb question. But can they access my blobs? and can I control exactly who can access my blobs?
They can obviously RDP into my VMs, that's not an issue. I assume they can hit my VMs too, via the IP address, inside Azure, etc. However, I am more interested in the Blobs. Mostly because I am starting to upload a lot of utility data (large sample datasets, common software we all install, etc.) and I would like to avoid all of us having to upload all of it again for each subscriptions.
As of today (11/8/2013), you cannot "pool" MSDN resources meaning..have 4 subscriptions add up to $400/month and do ala carte cloud services
You can have one admin/or several for multiple subscriptions, this will allow you to view the different subscriptions in the portal and manage them in a single spot
You can also have different deployment profiles, so one Visual Studio instance can deploy to different Azure accounts.
Specific to your question, you have blob access keys and if you share the name of the storage account and key...yes they can access your data located there.
Yes, it is possible to control access to your blobs by using SAS (Shared Access Signatures)
SAS grants granular access to container, blob, table, & queue
This should be a good resource to start with :
Manage Access to Windows Azure Storage Resources
Create and Use a Shared Access Signature
However, I would like other members of our team to access certain of
the assets. I am quite new to the Azure infrastructure, so this might
be a dumb question. But can they access my blobs? and can I control
exactly who can access my blobs?
To answer specifically this question, Yes your team members can access the data stored in any blob storage account in any of your subscription. There are two ways by which you can provide them access to blob storage:
By giving them account name/account key: Using this, they get full access to storage account and essentially become owners of that storage account.
By using Shared Access Signature: If you want to give them restricted access to blob storage, you would need to use SAS as described by Dan Dinu. SAS basically gives you a URL using which users in possession of that URL can explore storage (by writing some code), however it is not possible to identify which user accessed which storage. For that you would need to write something on your own.
Why do we link an azure storage account to a cloud service? How does it help? What happens if I do not link them?
Two reasons:
Easier management - you have better idea of what is your overall configuration for a particular deployment
Easier management - upon deleting a resource you are being asked whether you want to delete the linked resources also
By the way, you can also link a Windows Azure SQL Database to a Cloud Service.
The whole idea is to help you better manage the services. There is no other reason and nothing will happen if you do not link. But think a bit - if you manage 3 subscriptions, 2 cloud services deployments each, 2 storage accounts per deployment. That is 6 cloud services, 12 storage accounts. Can you easily tell which service is using which account?
The cloud service depends on the storage account. When deploying the cloud service it will create a container called vsdeploy with a block blob that is used for the VMs it creates.
It also stores crash dump files there as well under the container wad-crashdumps. The folder structure is WAD{GUID}{worker role}{instance}. Then it will store all the .dmp files as block blobs.
currently I'm playing around with Azure and thinking about a multi-tanent web app where users can create an instance of the app, where more users can register to upload and share files within this instance. I've created a blob storage service and created several containers. However, I'm not sure how customers may think about the fact, that they share their blob service with other users and files are only separated by containers. I would like that each user gets instead his own blob service. However the web app should be shared still by a single web worker role.
This sounds easy for every instance you create by hand, however I want the blob service to be created automatically as the user registers and creates his instance of the web app. Unfortunately I haven't found yet any information about how I could accomplish this. I've found only the blob storage api to query the service, not for creating it.
Can anybody lead me in the right direction? Is this even possible?
You can create a storage account programmatically (see "Create Storage Account": http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh264518.aspx), but I wouldn't recommend creating a different account for each user. The limit on how many storage accounts can be created per subscription is fairly low. (I believe the default is five and you can call to get your quota increased to twenty.)
In general, the recommendation is to go ahead and use the same storage account for all your customers. I believe your concern is about data security, but adding multiple storage accounts doesn't really change the security dynamic. (The trust boundary is still between you and the end user, since only your code will directly access storage.)