How do I store files on Windows Azure Web Site?

Question

I just read an article about Windows Azure Web Site and would like to evaluate this service. My company just developed an ASP.NET MVC based website that enables our customers to download files we provide as well as upload files.

Both works based on URLs that we send. The workflow is easy: 1. We login to our website, upload a file and retrieve a link generated by the site 2. We send the link to the customer by e-mail 3. The customer can use this link without the need to authenticate and easily download the file.

Or 1. We login to out website and retrieve an upload link generated by the site 2. We send the link to the customer by e-mail 3. The customer can use this link without the need to authenticate and easily upload a file.

We are currently hosting this website locally in our own infrastructure. The Website is used rarely and the files are not that big. We are storing them simply on our fileserver.

I would like to find out how to host this website on WAWS and the first question I have is: What options do I have for actually storing the files? Second: Our website sends notification e-mails to us internally when a customer downloaded or uploaded a file. Is this possible with WAWS?

Answer 1

If you want to persist files in Windows Azure (Web Sites) you should use Blob Storage. Features that you might like:

• All files uploaded here get an URL like this: http://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/somecontainer/somefile.txt
• You can use a custom CNAME to get http://files.mycompany.com/somecontainer/somefile.txt
• You can apply security to blobs through shared access signatures
• Blob storage is very cheap
• Every blob is replicated across three computers in a Windows Azure datacenter. Writing to a blob updates all three copies, so later reads won’t see inconsistent results.
• Geo-replication replicates your Windows Azure Blob and Table data between two locations that are hundreds of miles apart and within the same region (i.e., between North Central and South Central US, between North Europe and Europe West, and between East and South East Asia).
• Limited to 100TB per storage account

Sending emails on the other hand is not possible with Windows Azure. You'll need to do this through a third party. I personally use Amazon SES but SendGrid is also a good option since they have a special offering for Azure users.