Azure - Sort order of List operation on blob container

Question

What is the sort order of a list operation on a blob container? Is it like Azure Table Storage, where it is alphabetic?

Answer 1

From the last line of "List Blobs" in MSDN - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd135734.aspx

Blobs are listed in alphabetical order in the response body.

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As an aside, in one of the PDC deep dive talks, the storage team talked about the fact that blobs are keyed on a combination of the container name and blob path, so this is what determines the list order - and it also determines "hot spots" if you are hitting blob storage for lots of similarly named files.

Answer 2

Given that blobs supports an equivalent of the continuation tokens used by table storage (Marker/NextMarker) the order that blobs are returned in would have to be fixed. While it's not explicitly mentioned in the specs that we have access to, I suspect blobs will always be returned in alphabetic order. I'd be happy if someone from MS could verify this though.