Azure Blob storage vs Azure Drive

Question

I am looking at moving to Windows Azure rather than typical hosting however I'm unsure how best to store images. After searching I've found that there are 2 possible solutions - Blob storage or Azure drive.

I have looked into Blob storage and although I have begun to get used to the idea it will require quite a lot of modification to our CMS. In my searching I have just stumbled across Azure Drive which if I understand correctly creates a virtual hard drive which allows your application to run as it would on a normal server.

Are there any disadvantages to Azure Drive over blob storage? It sounds like migrating current applications to Azure will be much easier with Azure Drive rather than Blob storage but I just wanted to check that there weren't any major flaws in this.

Thanks

Pat

Answer 1

Yes, there are quite a few differences. First, the Windows Azure drive is actually a VHD uploaded as a page blob and mounted by a driver to provide a NTFS partition. So, to get any data on it, you must mount it (or a snapshot). Data is not directly accessible without mounting.

Next, Drives can only be mounted for RW by one instance. If you want anything else to even read that drive, you must snapshot and mount, which introduces a 'staleness' problem to read only instances that are mounting snapshots. You can work around this with an SMB share, but that is slightly complicated.

You would lose the ability to automatically get CDN capabilities if you used a drive as well.

Drives are great for their intended purpose - getting applications that must use NTFS to work in Windows Azure.

If you were to use Blobs natively, you would a.) get the storage subsystem to scale and remove the load from your instances for serving the data and b.) be able to use the CDN to get geoscale on the images as well.

While it is some work, I would strongly recommend putting images in blob storage. It is ideal for it.