Images in Azure storage

0
votes

Where would it be appropriate to store structured photos in Azure storage? There a ton (millions) of photos and they are currently sitting in folders locally.

I originally looked at blob storage to hold them, but that is for unstructured data; then I looked at table storage, but I'm not sure if the file size is too large for the entity. Also looked at file storage, but it seems like that's only in preview upon request.

1
azureazure-storage
What's wrong with keeping them in folders? File systems are very good at storing files. - user1864610
Sorry, want to be more specific. They are currently sitting on a local machine, looking to see if there is a better way to store them in Azure. - m00nbeam360
Use OneDrive. 15GB for free or you can game the setup of 100GB (for free for 12 months) by following these steps: redmondpie.com/… - Simon W
Hmm, I'm not sure about that. I think that the goal is to move the photos to Azure. If there isn't a good solution/if keeping them local is better, then we'll have to go that way. - m00nbeam360

1 Answers

6
votes

Blob Storage is the way to go. It is meant for that purpose only - storing files in the cloud. Some additional reasons:

  • Today, each storage account can hold 500 TB of data so if you're storing images only in your storage account, you can store up to 500 TB of data.
  • 3 copies of each item (file in your case) is maintained in the region. If you enable Geo-Replication on your storage (GRS), 3 additional copies are maintained in a secondary region which is at least 400 miles away from the primary reason. So it would be a good strategy for disaster recovery purposes.
  • As it is cloud storage solution, you only pay for the storage space you occupy. So for example if you are storing only 15 GB data, you will only pay for 15 GB.

Table Storage is mainly intended for storing structured/semi-structured data in key/value pair format. Further, size of each item (known as Entity in table storage lingo) can be of a maximum 1 MB in size. Each item in blob storage can be of a maximum of 200 GB in size.

A few other things to consider:

  • Blob storage is a 2 level storage: Container and Blob. Think of a container as a folder on your computer and blob as a file. Unlike local storage, you can't have nested folders in blob storage.
  • Even though blob storage doesn't support nested folder hierarchy, you can create an illusion of nested folder hierarchy by something called blob prefix. To give you an example, let's say you have images folder and inside that folder the image files are grouped by year (2014, 2015 etc.). So in this case, you can create a container called images. Now when it comes to saving files (say C:\images\2014\image1.png), you can prefix the folder path so your image will be saved as 2014/image1.png in the container images.
  • You can make use of some available storage explorers for uploading purposes. Most of the storage explorers support preserving the folder hierarchy.