Azure blobs, what are they for?

Question

I'm reading about Azure blobs and storage, and there are things I don't understand.

First, you can hire Azure for just hosting, but when you create a web role ... do you need storage for the .dll's and other files (.js and .css) ?? Or there are a small storage quota in a worker role you can use? how long is it? I cannot understand getting charged every time a browser download a CSS file, so I guess I can store those things in another kind of storage.

Second, you get charged for transaction and bandwidth, so it's not a good idea to provide direct links to the blobs in your websites, then... what do you do? Download it from your web site code and write to the client output stream on the fly from ASP.NET? I think I've read that internal trafic/transactions are for free, so it looks like a "too-good-for-be-truth" solution :D

Is the trafic between hosting and storage also free?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

First, to answer your main question: blobs are best used for dynamic data files. If you run a YouTube sorta site, you would use blobs to store videos in every compressed state and thumbnails to images generated from those videos. Tables within table storage are best for dynamic data that does not require files. For example comments on YouTube videos would likely be best stored by tables in ATS.

1. You generally want a storage account for at least: publishing your deployments into Azure and to have your compute nodes transfer their diagnostic data to, for when you're deployed and need to monitor your compute nodes

2. Even though you publish your deployments THROUGH a storage account, the deployment code lives on your compute nodes. .CSS/.HTML files served by your app are served through your node's storage space which you get plenty of (it is NOT a good place for your dynamic data however)

3. You pay for traffic/data that crosses the Azure data center boundary, irregardless where it came from. Furthermore, transactions (reads or writes) between your azure table storage and anywhere else are not free. You also pay for storing the data in the storage account (storing data on compute nodes themselves is not metered). Data that does not leave their data center is not subject to transfer fees. Now in reality, the costs are so low, that you have to be pushing gigabytes per day to start noticing

4. Don't store any dynamic data only on compute instances. That data will get purged whenever you redeploy your app or whenever they decide to move your app onto a different node.

Hope this helps