What is the use cases for Azure file storage?

Question

I'm using Azure file storage and there was a huge number of files uploaded. A single file will be 250kb in size and there will be 7000 files in a directory. So when the user request I need to get the data from 100 files in a single call. At first, I was accessing the files using native file IO methods after mounting the fileshare in the Azure VM. But it was slow due to file IO. Then I changed the native file IO to Azure Rest API and it was slightly fast.

So does this Azure file storage suits for my requirement or do I need to consider no-sql storages?
What was the exact use cases for file storage?

Answer 1

In my experience the usecase for an azure VM/disk space is aligned to scenarios related the execution of your program (say a config file or a limited number of resources).

If you want to upload a lot of data you should look into azure blob storage. Depending on your scenario it might be more cost effective

Microsoft also has some documentation what to use when here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/storage-decide-blobs-files-disks

and of course the pricing https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/

Answer 2

storage-decide-blobs-files-disks

You want to "lift and shift" an application to the cloud which already uses the native file system APIs to share data between it and other applications running in Azure.