In Azure how can multiple Web Roles read from the same Lucene.net index that is stored in Blob Storage?

Question

In Azure how can multiple Web Roles read from the same Lucene.net index that is stored in Blob Storage?

BTW - I'm using the Lucene.Net.Store.Azure library from NuGet to persist my Lucene.net index to Azure Blob Storage.

The problem I'm encountering is outlined below in the following diagram:

One idea I had was to ensure that each of my Web Roles acted in "read only" mode, and did not ever write to the index. I could create a separate Worker Role to the writing. I'm not sure if that would work though.

Another idea I had was to make multiple copies of the index; one for each Web Role. It seems kind of inefficient though.

Answer 1

Your first idea is good. I would also suggest implementing a separate worker role to write to the index. Since Azure SLA required two servers per any role, you can implementing a queuing or blob leasing mechanism to ensure that two workers do not try to write to the index at the same time.