Azure - Multiple Cloud Services, Single Storage Account

Question

I want to create a couple of cloud services - Int, QA, and Prod. Each of these will connect to separate Db's.

Do these cloud services require "storage accounts"? Conceptually the cloud services have executables and they must be physically located somewhere.

Note: I do not use any blobs/queues/tables.

If so, must I create 3 separate storage accounts or link them up to one?

Answer 1

Storage accounts are more like storage namespaces - it has a url and a set of access keys. You can use storage from anywhere, whether from the cloud or not, from one cloud service or many.

As @sharptooth pointed out, you need storage for diagnostics with Cloud Services. Also for attached disks (Azure Drives for cloud services), deployments themselves (storing the cloud service package and configuration).

Storage accounts are free: That is, create a bunch, and still only pay for consumption.

There are some objective reasons why you'd go with separate storage accounts:

• You feel that you could exceed the 20,000 transaction/second advertised limit of a single storage account (remember that storage diagnostics are using some of this transaction rate, which is impacted by your logging-aggressiveness).
• You are concerned about security/isolation. You may want your dev and QA folks using an entirely different subscription altogether, with their own storage accounts, to avoid any risk of damaging a production deployment
• You feel that you'll exceed 200TB 500TB (the limit of a single storage account)

Answer 2

Azure Diagnostics uses Azure Table Storage under the hood (and it's more convenient to use one storage account for every service, but it's not required). Other dependencies your service has might also use some of the Azure Storage services. If you're sure that you don't need Azure Storage (and so you don't need persistent storage of data dumped through Azure Diagnostics) - okay, you can go without it.

The service package of your service will be stored and managed by Azure infrastructure - that part doesn't require a storage account.