We recently published a paper describing the internal details of Windows Azure Storage at the 23 rd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) . The paper can be found here . The conference also posted a video of the talk here , and the slides...

Update: We have now released a fix for this issue.  The download blob methods in this version throw an IOException if the connection is closed while downloading the blob, which is the same behavior seen in versions 1.4 and earlier of the StorageClient...

We are excited to release geo-replication and a new version of the REST API to enable functionality improvements for Windows Azure Blobs, Tables, and Queues. At this time we are now geo-replicating all Windows Azure Blob and Table data, at no additional...

We are excited to announce that we are now geo-replicating customer’s Windows Azure Blob and Table data, at no additional cost, between two locations hundreds of miles apart within the same region (i.e., between North and South US, between North...

As part of the “2011-08-18” version, we have introduced several commonly requested features to the Windows Azure Queue service. The benefits of these new features are: Allow applications to store larger messages Allow applications to schedule work to...

As part of the “2011-08-18” version, two Windows Azure Table features were introduced; Upsert, represented by the InsertOrReplace Entity and InserOrMerge Entity APIs, and Query Projection. In this section, we will first provide an overview of these two...

In the new 2011-08-18 version of the Windows Azure Blob service, we have made some changes to improve browser download and streaming for some media players. We also provided an extension to Blob Service settings to allow anonymous and un-versioned requests...

Windows Azure Storage Analytics offers you the ability to track, analyze, and debug your usage of storage(Blobs, Tables and Queues). You can use this data to analyze storage usage to improve the design of your applications and their access patterns to...

Windows Azure Storage Metrics allows you to track your aggregated storage usage for Blobs, Tables and Queues. The details include capacity, per service request summary, and per API level aggregates. The metrics information is useful to see aggregate view...

Windows Azure Storage Logging provides a trace of the executed requests against your storage account (Blobs, Tables and Queues).  It allows you to monitor requests to your storage accounts, understand performance of individual requests, analyze usage...

UPDATED 11/17/11 with a high availability sample We often get questions from customers about how to share a drive with read-write access among multiple role instances. A common scenario is that of a content repository for multiple web servers to access...

Update 3/09/011: The bug is fixed in the Windows Azure SDK March 2011 release . In the current Windows Azure storage client library, BlobStream.Read() may read less than the requested number of bytes if the user rewinds the stream position. This occurs...

Update 11/06/11: The bug is fixed in the Windows Azure SDK September release . There is a race condition in the current Windows Azure Storage Client Library that could potentially throw an unhandled exception under certain circumstances. Essentially...

Overview Windows Azure Blob service provides mechanisms to ensure data integrity both at the application and transport layers. This post will detail these mechanisms from the service and client perspective. MD5 checking is optional on both PUT and GET...

With the Windows Azure SDK 1.3 it is now possible to run web roles with Full IIS. If you are unfamiliar with Full IIS you might want to look at this blog which captures the differences between Full IIS and Hosted Web Core (HWC) the only option available...

The RetryPolicies in the Storage Client Library are used to allow the user to customize the retry behavior when and exception occurs. There are a few key points when using RetryPolicies that users should take into consideration, the first is when they...

Update 1-2-2012: See the new post on Windows Azure Storage: A Highly Available Cloud Storage Service with Strong Consistency , which gives a much more detailed and up to date description of the Windows Azure Storage Architecture. In this posting...

When running in the cloud, a few customers have reported that CloudDrive.InitializeCache() and CloudDrive.Mount() occasionally fail with ERROR_UNSUPPORTED_OS when running with SDK 1.3.   This error can occur when your service calls a CloudDrive...

Update 3/09/011: The bug is fixed in the Windows Azure SDK March 2011 release . The current Windows Azure Storage Client Library does not support passing in a stream to CloudPageBlob.[Begin]WritePages where the stream position is a non-zero value....

We recently released an update to the Storage Client library in SDK 1.3 . We wanted to take this opportunity to go over some breaking changes that we have introduced and also list some of the bugs we have fixed (compatible changes) in this release. ...

Update 11/06/11: The bug is fixed in the Windows Azure SDK September release . Summary In certain scenarios, using the synchronous methods provided in the Windows Azure Storage Client Library can lead to deadlock. Specifically, scenarios where the...

Update 3/09/011: The bug is fixed in the Windows Azure SDK March 2011 release . Summary There is an issue in the Windows Azure Storage Client Library that can lead to unexpected behavior when utilizing the CloudBlob.DownloadToFile() methods . ...

Windows Azure drives support the use of a local cache to improve performance of drives. With the upcoming Guest OS 1.8 and 2.0 releases, there’s a breaking change in the way this local cache is allocated. Background A Windows Azure application...

Introduction Windows Azure Storage is a scalable and durable cloud storage system in which applications can store data and access it from anywhere and at any time. Windows Azure Storage provides a rich set of data abstractions: Windows Azure...

The issues are resolved in the Windows Azure SDK 1.3 release which can be downloaded here . 1. Application crashes with unhandled NullReferenceException that is raised on a callback thread Storage Client uses a timer object to keep track of timeouts...