Tuesday, August 31, 2010

COS304 Azure Storage Deep Dive

Speaker: Chris Auld

Scalable - You will run out of money before disk.

Exposed

15 cents per gigabyte to store.

RESTful Web Services
- Use Azure or local apps.

Asian data centres are more expensive for data.
.
Can CDN Enable Account

Account is secured with a 512 bit shared secret key.
500 TB per account.

Storage in the Development Fabric
 - good for developing offline.
 - costs minimal (cents) if developing with less than 1 GB of data a month.

Storage Security

- HTTPS - Digitally sign requests for privileged operations.

Azure Storage Abstractions

Blobs - Could be used to serve static content. 60 MB/s output speed. Account Container - Grouping of blobs. Limited throughput per container. Blob - Identified by name Pages / Blocks - two types of blob. Blob is always accessed by name. Special $root container. - Allows for definition of clientaccesspolicy.xml http://[account].blob.core.windows.net/[containter]/[blobname] Can use prefix/delimiter and special blob naming to simulate directory structure. Pagination - returns continuation token (MarkerValue) to continue beyond page. Use Affinity group to keep computing and storage together and avoid paying for extra network traffic. Block Blob - used for streaming an entire file. ETags - versioning support over HTML Block blobs - can be uploaded in parallel via blocks and then recombined in Windows Azure Storage. Makes retry more efficient. Page Blob - targeted at random read/write workloads. Fixed 512 bytes Shared Access Signatures - E.g. Grant read access to a certain blob for a period of time and then pass to client as a URL. Revoke by timeout or via a container level policy that can be deleted. Ad Hoc Signatures. Policy Based Signature - container level policy allows revoking. Drives - Wrap the blob storage and allow NTFS volumes Tables - Queues -

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Public blobs can be served via the Windows Azure CDN URL.
Could map custom domain to the CDN.