Why do we link an azure storage account to a cloud service?

4
votes

Why do we link an azure storage account to a cloud service? How does it help? What happens if I do not link them?

2
azureazure-storage
Can you provide some more details? You don't have to have both a storage account and a cloud service. You can create a cloud service without a storage account. – mcollier

2 Answers

3
votes

Two reasons:

  1. Easier management - you have better idea of what is your overall configuration for a particular deployment
  2. Easier management - upon deleting a resource you are being asked whether you want to delete the linked resources also

By the way, you can also link a Windows Azure SQL Database to a Cloud Service.

The whole idea is to help you better manage the services. There is no other reason and nothing will happen if you do not link. But think a bit - if you manage 3 subscriptions, 2 cloud services deployments each, 2 storage accounts per deployment. That is 6 cloud services, 12 storage accounts. Can you easily tell which service is using which account?

2
votes

The cloud service depends on the storage account. When deploying the cloud service it will create a container called vsdeploy with a block blob that is used for the VMs it creates.

It also stores crash dump files there as well under the container wad-crashdumps. The folder structure is WAD{GUID}{worker role}{instance}. Then it will store all the .dmp files as block blobs.