A complete Guide to Windows Azure
Storage
Himanshu Sahu
Mindfire Solution
himanshus@mindfiresolutions.com

Windows Azure Storage
Windows Azure Storage (WAS) is a scalable cloud storage
system that has been in production since November 2008. It
is used inside Microsoft for applications such as social
networking search, serving video, music and game content,
managing medical records, and more.

Windows Azure Storage

Cloud Storage – Anywhere and anytime Access

Durable and higly Available

Massively Scalable – Easily Build “internet-scale” application

Pay for what you use

Exlopsed via REST API and easy to use client libraries in
.NET, JAVA, Node.js, etc

Windows Azure Storage
Abstraction
Blobs
Tables
Queue

Windows Azure Storage
Blob

Simple Interface to store and retrieve large amount of
unstructured data like files, images, videos, etc

A single blob can be hundreds of gigabytes in size, and a
single storage account can contain up to 200TB of blobs if it
was created on June 8th, 2012, or later and storage accounts
created prior to that date can contain up to 100TB of blobs.

Windows Azure Storage
Blob
Concept

Windows Azure Storage
Blob
Concept
Storage Account – All access to Windows Azure Storage is
done through a storage account.

This is the highest level of the namespace for accessing
blobs

An account can have many Blob Containers
Blob Container – A container provides a grouping of a set of
blobs. The container name is scoped by the account.

Sharing policies are set at the container level, where a
container can be set to private or to be publicly accessible.

The ability to list all of the blobs within the container is also
provided.

Windows Azure Storage
Blob
Concept
Blob – Blobs are stored in and scoped by Blob Containers.
Blobs can have meta data associated with them, which are
<name, value> pairs, and they are up to 8KB in size per blob.
The blob metadata can be set and retrieved separately from
the blob data bits.

URL format- Blobs are addressable using the following URL
format:
http://<storageaccount>.blob.core.windows.net/<container>/<
blob>

Windows Azure Storage
Blob
Concept
<configuration>

<appSettings>

<add key="StorageConnectionString"
value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=[
AccountName];AccountKey=[AccountKey]" />

</appSettings>

</configuration>

Windows Azure Storage
Blob
Common uses of Blob storage:

Serving images or documents directly to a browser

Storing files for distributed access

Streaming video and audio

Performing secure backup and disaster recovery

Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Windows
Azure-hosted service

Windows Azure Storage
Blob
Practical Scenarios where we use Blobs:

Enterprise document store, logs, etc.

Social sharing like photos, videos, blogs.

Backups – file, database, devices, computer, etc.

Windows Azure Storage
Table

NoSQL datastore which accepts authenticated calls from
inside and outside the Windows Azure cloud.

Used for storing structured, non-relational data.

Windows Azure Storage
Table
Concept

Windows Azure Storage
Table
Concept
Storage Account – All access to Windows Azure Storage is
done through a storage account.

This is the highest level of the namespace for accessing
tables

An account can have many Tables
Table – contains a set of entities. Table names are scoped by
the account. An application may create many tables within a
storage account.

Windows Azure Storage
Table
Concept
Entity (Row) – Entities (an entity is analogous to a "row") are
the basic data items stored in a table. An entity contains a set
of properties. Each table has two properties, “PartitionKey
and RowKey”, which form the unique key for the entity.

Combined size of all of the properties in an entity cannot
exceed 1MB. This size includes the size of the property
names as well as the size of the property values or their
types.

Windows Azure Storage
Table
Concept

Property (Column) – A property is a name-value pair.

This represents a single value in an entity. Property names
are case sensitive.
An entity can hold up to 255 properties. Each entity also has
3 system properties that specify a partition key, a row key,
and a timestamp.

Windows Azure Storage
Table
Concept
PartitionKey – The first key property of every table. The
system uses this key to automatically distribute and load
balance the table’s entities over many servers.
RowKey – A second key property for the table. This is the
unique ID of the entity within the partition it belongs to. The
PartitionKey combined with the RowKey uniquely identifies an
entity in a table.
Timestamp – Every entity has a version maintained by the
system. This is used for optimistic concurrency.

Windows Azure Storage
Table
Common uses of Table storage:

Storing TBs of structured data capable of serving web scale
applications

Storing datasets that don't require complex joins, foreign
keys, or stored procedures and can be denormalized for fast
access

Quickly querying data using a clustered index

Windows Azure Storage
Queue

Scalable, reliable and persistent messaging system that
enables building work flow application or decouple
components.

Windows Azure Storage
Queue
Concept

Windows Azure Storage
Queue
Concept
Storage Account – All access to Windows Azure Storage is
done through a storage account.

This is the highest level of the namespace for accessing
queues

An account can have many Queues

Windows Azure Storage
Queue
Concept
Queue – A queue contains many messages. The queue
name is scoped by the account.

There is no limit on the number of messages stored in a
queue (the only limit is the 200TB size limit on the storage
account).

A message is stored for at most a week. The system will
garbage collect the messages that are more than a week old.

Queues can have metadata associated with them. Metadata
is in the form of <name, value> pairs, and they are up to 8KB
in size per queue.

Windows Azure Storage
Queue
Concept
Messages – Messages are stored in queues. Each message
can be up to 8KB in size. To store larger data, one can store
the data in Azure Blob store or Azure Table store, and then
store the blob/entity name in the message. Note that when
you put a message into the store, the message data can be
binary. But when you get the messages back from the store,
the response is in XML format, and the message data is
returned as base64 encoded.

Windows Azure Storage
Queue
Concept

Where Azure Queues differ from traditional queue
implementations is that it is not a FIFO container. This
means, the message will remain in the queue until explicitly
deleted. If a message is read by one process, it will be
marked as invisible to other processes for a variable time
period, which defaults to 30 seconds, and can be no more
than 2 hours; if the message hasn't been deleted by then, it
will be returned to the queue and will be available for
processing again. Because of this behavior, there is also no
guarantee that messages will be in any particular order.

Windows Azure Storage
Queue
Concept
Messages – Messages are stored in queues. Each message
can be up to 8KB in size. To store larger data, one can store
the data in Azure Blob store or Azure Table store, and then
store the blob/entity name in the message. Note that when
you put a message into the store, the message data can be
binary. But when you get the messages back from the store,
the response is in XML format, and the message data is
returned as base64 encoded.

Windows Azure Storage
Queue
Common uses of Queue storage:

Creating a backlog of work to process asynchronously

Inter-Role Communication

Process/Work Flow

Windows Azure Storage

Windows Azure Storage Scalability and Performance Targe

Resources
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/services/stora
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/how-to-guides/ta
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/how-to-guides/bl
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2010/05/10/

Questions?

Thank you!