Failure to unzip application packages in Azure Batch

Question

I followed the guidance in this wiki page to create an application package for my Azure Batch pool, but now my nodes are stuck in an unusable state because it fails to unzip. I can't find anything in the documentation that talks about what kind of compressed file is acceptable here, other than "a zip file".

I have a collection of database files used for some genomic sequencing tools that I have stored in a folder structure, which I created a compressed archive with using tar -zvcf and gave a .zip extension to. That did not work, so I tried uploading the same file with a .tar.gz extension and it also failed.

The Batch Node is running the CentOS image Azure Batch recommends for container applications, and my startup task is not running in the context of the container.

Can anyone point me to documentation or personal experience that helps clarify what kind of files can be used for this? Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Yes, you are correct, but let me emphasise on the confusion, tar is the different compress archive file format then zip i.e. more detail here: What is the difference between tar and zip? it is mentioned many times in the documentation you mentioned along with

• Batch App Package feature only support *.zip format and hence changing file extension from *.tar to *.zip is not the right way as they are 2 different way they get compressed et. al.

Extra docs:

• https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/blog/application-packages-and-task-dependencies-now-available-on-azure-batch/

• https://kb.winzip.com/help/winzip/AboutZIPsAndOtherArchives_4.htm

Thanks and hope it helps.