Do Autoscale instances replicate disk files?

Question

I have a website hosted on Windows Azure. Currently, I'm running into some problems where some files that were uploaded by users are showing 404 errors. These errors started occurring when I enabled Autoscale.

So my question is: Does Autoscale replicate disk changes? E.g. If autoscale scales the website to 2 instances, and instance 1 gets 2 new files, and instance 2 has 2 files deleted, if it is scaled back to 1 instance, are those changes on instance 2 lost, or are they propogated back so that instance 1 has both the 2 added and 2 deleted files?

Answer 1

Autoscale does not replicate disk changes. If you are running any website (not just Azure) in a distributed environment (multiple servers are handling traffic), you should not be utilizing local disk or other local resources to store data that should be shared across servers. Only one server will see their own data.

From Azure perspective, you should be using utilizing Azure Blob Storage to store centrally visible files.