Azure web apps with user uploaded content

Question

I'm building an app involves user uploaded content (images, docs, pdfs) and would like to consider azure web apps for the hosting solution. Of particular interest is the deployment slot feature.

I understand that using the deployment slots prevents me from storing the user content in the filesystem.

I'm not excited about using blob storage for the user uploaded content because that really ties my app to Azure and would make it difficult to move to another host or implement a vendor redundant DR site. Database storage isn't all that exciting to me either.

Ideally the web app would have a virtual directory mapped to that blob storage but I understand that isn't a possibility.

Are there any good solutions to this issue?

Answer 1

You can add web apps to a virtual network that allow you to store content on file shares on other machines in the vnet. Doing so allows the webapp to communicate with other machines on the network where you can configure a file share.

You could point the website to the share via the web.config/application settings section of the portal to point deployment slots to different shares, etc.

Here's an official link: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-create-vnet-arm-pportal/