How to refer associated storage account from webrole?

Question

I have a webservice which uploads data to blob store. I have 2 deployments of this webservice, on in south east asia and one in US. Each deployment has a different storage account associated with it(while creating a cloud service you can associate a storage account with it), say StorageSEA and StorageUS.

As of now, I read the storage account connection string from the config, which means that when I deploy to southeast asia I have to go and update the connection string to point to StorageSEA and change it to StorageUS when publishing to US. This doesn't seem like a approach I will be able to sustain in future, as I plan to go ahead with more deployments.

So I was wondering if there was a way to get the associated storage account instead of updating the config file for each deployment.

Answer 1

There are two solutions I could think of:

1. Use config transformation to create 2 separate deployment configuration files - one for South East Asia and other one for US. Each config file will have storage account for that data center.

2. Programmatically identify the deployment location - In this case, you would define both storage account connection string in your configuration file. When the role starts up, you would find the data center location of the cloud service and based on that you pick up one of the values. For this to work, you would need to implement Service Management API's Get Hosted Service Properties operation (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee460806.aspx).