I'm looking at the possibility of offloading the media for a bunch of client sites from the local drive to Azure Blob Storage. I've not used any of the Azure services much before so have some basic questions I'm hoping people might be able to help a noob with:
I believe it's possible to use Blob Storage for media items even if the actual website isn't hosted on Azure. How does this work in terms of performance though? Will it be noticeably slower than running media locally?
Perhaps related to question 1, do people typically also need to implement some sort of Azure caching as an additional service? Is this complicated to set up?
For a series of small but well-used/important brochure sites, would it be recommended to use Archive, Cool, Hot or Premium Blob Storage?
What about back-ups? A content editor deletes all of their media items by mistake. How would I get them back?
Is the process of getting existing media into Blob Storage straightforward?
Yes. In terms of performance it rather depends on the speed of connection between your site and Azure. If your host has really slow speeds then it'll be slow, if they don't it won't be !
Normally I use Azure CDN, the blob storage has fields for it. Dead easy to setup.
We run loads of sites on Azure, never had issues with the standard v2 storage with geo-redundant (GRS) redundancy.
We use soft delete on the blob so we can get the content back if we must. Given what some of our users are like, and we've not (touch wood) had any issues, I don't think you need to worry too much. Unless you've had someone delete all the content from media in the past? Obviously they'd have to delete it then go to the recycle bin in the back office and empty it before we'd have to go down the soft delete recall option.
Yep simple. Done lots of transfers over. FTP down your media folder, install MS storage explorer, drag media into the appropriate container on there (container basically means folder for this purpose)
Consider putting your forms on blob storage too. Then you can start doing stuff like slot swapping (if your host has that facility) , which is very nice.
Azure Blob Storage questions
Hi,
I'm looking at the possibility of offloading the media for a bunch of client sites from the local drive to Azure Blob Storage. I've not used any of the Azure services much before so have some basic questions I'm hoping people might be able to help a noob with:
Thanks for any pointers folks :)
Yes. In terms of performance it rather depends on the speed of connection between your site and Azure. If your host has really slow speeds then it'll be slow, if they don't it won't be !
Normally I use Azure CDN, the blob storage has fields for it. Dead easy to setup.
We run loads of sites on Azure, never had issues with the standard v2 storage with geo-redundant (GRS) redundancy.
We use soft delete on the blob so we can get the content back if we must. Given what some of our users are like, and we've not (touch wood) had any issues, I don't think you need to worry too much. Unless you've had someone delete all the content from media in the past? Obviously they'd have to delete it then go to the recycle bin in the back office and empty it before we'd have to go down the soft delete recall option.
Yep simple. Done lots of transfers over. FTP down your media folder, install MS storage explorer, drag media into the appropriate container on there (container basically means folder for this purpose)
Consider putting your forms on blob storage too. Then you can start doing stuff like slot swapping (if your host has that facility) , which is very nice.
HTH
Thanks Paul, very useful.
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