Let’s say we have an app deployed to Azure. App has external files not bundled with it, files which are required for app to operate. They are seperate but are essentially part of the software. Normally without a cloud service, we put these files on a disk path and tell the path to app using an environment variable.
Since writing to disk may be non persistent in a cloud environment, is this a case for using BlobStorage? Or is it for accessing files from anywhere, any app, in a manner similar to Dropbox? These files are not required to be available online, only the app needs to access them, so these kind of access is not required but also not appropriate.
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Since writing to disk may be non persistent in a cloud environment, is this a case for using BlobStorage?
Generally, no. Blob Storage doesn’t really make files available in the way that apps will want to use/consume them (plain old URI or file path). A more traditional CDN is a better fit for assets, and having the files as part of your cloud image deployment if they’re dependencies.
It is kind of like Dropbox, but that’s probably not the best way to think about it. Sometimes, your app needs to work with data that is too big to fit into SQL, and too unstructured to even fit into Table Storage. It’s just some blob of data your app/users work with. That’s Blob Storage.