The four object abstractions Windows Azure Storage provides for application developers are: Blobs – Provides a simple interface for storing named files along with metadata for the file. Tables – Provides massively scalable structured...

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...

We get questions about how to estimate how much Windows Azure Storage will cost in order to understand how to best build a cost effective application. In this post we will give some insight into this question for the three types of storage costs –...

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...

We get a few queries every now and then on the availability of utilities for Windows Azure Storage and decided to put together a list of the storage explorers we know of. The tools are all Windows Azure Storage explorers that can be used to enumerate...

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...

This post refers to the Storage Client Library shipped in SDK 1.2. Windows Azure SDK 1.3 provides additional Page Blob functionality via the CloudPageBlob class. The current release can be downloaded here . We introduced Page Blobs at PDC 2009 as a...

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...

We heard you loud and clear that you want cheaper transaction costs for Windows Azure Blobs, Tables, Queues, and Drives. We are therefore very pleased today to slash transaction prices 10 fold for Windows Azure Storage and CDN. This means that it now...

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...

We’re excited to announce that, as part of version 2012-02-12, we have introduced Table Shared Access Signatures (SAS), Queue SAS and updates to Blob SAS. In this blog, we will highlight usage scenarios for these new features along with sample code using...

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...

We had recommended in a forum post about how turning off Nagling can greatly improve throughput for Table Inserts and Updates. We have also been seeing a lot of improvement when application deals with small sized messages (http message size < 1460...

This blog post serves as an overview to the recently released Windows Azure Storage Client for .Net and the Windows Runtime. In addition to the legacy implementation shipped in versions 1.x that is based on DataServiceContext, we have also provided a...

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...

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...

We are excited to introduce some changes to the Copy Blob API with 2012-02-12 version that allows you to copy blobs between storage accounts. This enables some interesting scenarios like: Backup your blobs to another storage account without having 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...

With the preview of Windows Azure Virtual Machines , we have two new special types of blobs stored in Windows Azure Storage: Windows Azure Virtual Machine Disks and Window Azure Virtual Machine Images. And of course we also have the existing preview of...

The recently released Windows Azure Storage Client Library for .Net includes many new features, expanded platform support, extensibility points, and performance improvements. In developing this version of the library we made some distinct breaks with...

A question we get asked is the following - Do applications need to backup data stored in Windows Azure Storage if Windows Azure Storage already stores multiple replicas of the data? For business continuity, it can be important to protect the data against...

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...

With a Windows Azure Drive , applications running in the Windows Azure cloud can use existing NTFS APIs to access a network attached durable drive. The durable drive is actually a Page Blob formatted as a single volume NTFS Virtual Hard Drive (VHD). ...

Today we are releasing version 2.0 of the Windows Azure Storage Client Library. This is our largest update to our .NET library to date which includes new features, broader platform compatibility, and revisions to address the great feedback you’ve...

“Do applications need to backup data in Windows Azure Storage if Windows Azure Storage already stores multiple replicas of the data?” For business continuity, it can be important to protect the data against errors in the application, which may erroneously...