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Microsoft Azure Storage Essentials
Microsoft Azure Storage Essentials

Microsoft Azure Storage Essentials: Harness the power of Microsoft Azure services to build efficient cloud solutions

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Profile Icon Chukri A Soueidi
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Paperback Aug 2015 126 pages 1st Edition
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Arrow left icon
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Paperback Aug 2015 126 pages 1st Edition
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Microsoft Azure Storage Essentials

Chapter 2. Developing Against Storage

The Azure Storage platform exposes two REST APIs that allow you to operate on it, one for service management and the other for dealing with each service specifically. These APIs allow developers to interact with and consume the storage services programmatically from applications. The platform also offers multiple client-side libraries for application, under open source licenses that encapsulate the functions of the REST APIs in a higher level code. These libraries target most of the major programming platforms. This chapter will be centered on the different APIs available, and then on the major client libraries available.

The Service Management REST APIs

The first set of APIs we will discuss are the Service Management APIs, but before that we must mention the management portal. The Azure platform provides a centralized web portal that allows you to manage your subscriptions and services through its interface.

Note

As of 2014, a new portal was made available, which includes a number of improvements and enhancements such as integrated billing, advanced application lifecycle management and deployment automation features.

All operations that can be performed from the portal for managing the storage accounts in subscriptions can also be done programmatically through the Service Management API. Actually, the portal itself uses the same APIs under the hood to perform such requests.

This programmatic access to such functionality is much needed by cloud applications that are usually designed to support multi-tenancy. Many scenarios require the creation of separate storage accounts for different tenants (customers)....

The Storage Services REST APIs

The second type of APIs to discuss are the Storage Services REST APIs which provide programmatic access to the four different services offered by Azure Storage: blobs, queues, tables, and files. These APIs can be accessed from the Internet, allowing them to be consumed from any kind of application that can send and receive HTTP requests and responses.

Every request to the Storage Service must be authenticated (except for reading public blobs); the services support a shared key authentication scheme with a required augmented signature string for enhanced security.

The service also supports the Shared Access Signature policy, which grants restricted access rights to each of its four services. These shared access signatures could be generated to clients who cannot be trusted on the storage account keys. The signature is created for particular resources, be it blob container, queue, table, or file for a specific period of time and defined permissions.

Azure Storage...

Azure Storage Client Libraries

Now we have seen how the Storage Service endpoints are exposed through the REST APIs that make them accessible by any platform using HTTP. These REST services provide a low level abstraction layer, which requires extensive filling of HTTP headers and repetitive work to be done by developers in order to execute operations. Microsoft provides several client libraries that give developers a higher layer of abstraction on these service. These object oriented libraries add extra functionality, like retrying policies that we will see later, and make developing with Azure Storage much easier. The rest of this chapter will list some of these libraries that target several platforms.

Microsoft Azure Storage Client Library for .NET

The .NET library allows you to access and execute operations on blobs, queues, tables and files from .Net applications. We will be using this library in the coming chapters to work with Storage Services.

Typically, in a .Net application, the...

Azure Storage Emulator

The Microsoft Azure SDK provides the Storage Emulator, a standalone package that provides a local environment for developers to emulate the Blob, Queue, and Table services on their machines. The storage emulator allows you to test the applications locally without any added cost. It uses a SQL server instance and the local file system on the computer to emulate the services.

The emulator has some limitations; it only allows one fixed pre-defined account and key. It also does not support large numbers of concurrent requests.

Addressing the emulator is slightly different than the Azure Storage, let us see in the following comparison how they differ. For referencing a blob in the Azure service you will use something like the following URL:

https://<your-account-name>.blob.core.windows.net/<your-container>/<your-blob>

For storage emulator referencing, you will replace the namespace of the service with your local machine address and port as shown below:

...

PowerShell

Using Windows PowerShell, you can also work and execute operations on Storage Services. PowerShell gives you the ability to write and prepare scripts that can automate a bunch of operations required by you for multiple purposes such as creating storage accounts and preparing for deployment. These scripts will make sure that the same steps and operations are executed each time in the same order, reducing the effort needed to set up your environment.

Note

For a full list of cmdlets available you can check the following article: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn806401.aspx

The Service Management REST APIs


The first set of APIs we will discuss are the Service Management APIs, but before that we must mention the management portal. The Azure platform provides a centralized web portal that allows you to manage your subscriptions and services through its interface.

Note

As of 2014, a new portal was made available, which includes a number of improvements and enhancements such as integrated billing, advanced application lifecycle management and deployment automation features.

All operations that can be performed from the portal for managing the storage accounts in subscriptions can also be done programmatically through the Service Management API. Actually, the portal itself uses the same APIs under the hood to perform such requests.

This programmatic access to such functionality is much needed by cloud applications that are usually designed to support multi-tenancy. Many scenarios require the creation of separate storage accounts for different tenants (customers). The...

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Description

With the many advantages of using cloud computing, Azure Storage is a robust platform that helps you shift faster to the cloud by providing scalable, durable and highly available data storage options. For developers, it provides a rapid development environment that supports building large-scale applications to support new scenarios on the cloud, server, mobile and web. For IT professionals, it reduces complexity of managing, protecting and replicating data. This book will make you familiar with the Azure storage in terms of architecture and components. It starts with the basics of storage accounts, which give access to the four basic services the Blob, Table, Queue, and File storage services. These services are exposed through a REST API that makes it possible for client libraries to implement most of their functionality in a wide range of popular programming languages. Emphasizing the Windows Azure Client Library for .NET, we will deal with storing and retrieving unstructured data with Blobs, then will move to Tables to insert and update entities in a structured NoSQL fashion. Then we will discover Queues as a reliable messaging service, and after that we will show File storage that allows you to migrate legacy applications data to the cloud to end with transient fault handling and service monitoring.

Who is this book for?

This book is intended for IT professionals and also for students, who are familiar with data management solutions and with web development. If you are a developer, you should be familiar with C# and Visual Studio in order to utilize the code examples available in this book.

What you will learn

  • Get familiar with Microsoft Azure Storage Service in terms of architecture and working
  • Recognize the libraries and tools offered by Azure storage, supporting several popular programming languages
  • Know how the storage services expose their resources as REST APIs and what client libraries exists to develop against the storage
  • Gain the understanding of types of Blobs and best ways to upload and retrieve them
  • Learn how to make use of Tables as a NoSQL data store and how to retrieve, insert, update and delete entities in terms of design patterns
  • Use Queue storage as a messaging solution for communications between different apps
  • Create mounted shares and allow legacy systems to access data using the SMB protocol
  • Get accustomed to deal with faults, monitor storage metrics and logs
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Table of Contents

9 Chapters
1. An Introduction to Microsoft Azure Storage Services Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Developing Against Storage Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Working with Blobs Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Working with Tables Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Designing Scalable and Performant Tables Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Working with Queues Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Working with the Azure File Service Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Transient Fault Handling and Analytics Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
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