Communicating from an Azure Website to an IP restricted FTP

Question

The Azure Website I'm currently working on needs to be able to upload and download files from a (third party) FTP. The FTP is IP restricted and since the Azure Websites don't have fixed / reserved IP's this becomes a problem.

A workaround could be to create a REST api (using WebApi) on a VM (which has a fixed ip). The website can use this REST api as proxy to the FTP. But I'm hoping someone has a better idea / experience with this problem?

Answer 1

As you've mentioned, there's no reserved outbound IP address. You'd really need to locate your ftp up/download code in a cloud service (web/worker) or VM. I have no idea of the data volume you're working with, but there are very affordable VM tiers (starting with A0 at $13/month) that you could provision your ftp management code to. How you actually manage your data at this point, I'll leave up to you (as there are many ways).