Adding two instances to a common disk Azure

Question

I am trying to a deploy an app which has a frontend app and a backend worker. The worker runs a CPU intensive process. Now my requirements are to run the web app in a Azure A0 instance while the CPU intensive process runs in a D2 instance. Now both the instance must be able to share the files. I have read at places where they spoke of SBS.

I tried creating the linux VMs in same cloud services but couldnt figure out how to ssh into them separately since they use the same cloud service url. i followed this http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cloud-services-connect-virtual-machine/ to create the 2nd vm.

Can anyone suggest me as how to achieve this setup? Also if possible how do i check if the disks are available to both the instances? Azure docs aren't as helpful as aws. :(

Answer 1

If the two VMs just want to share files and you don't want to go to the extra effort of coding for blob storage then consider Azure Files which exposes an SMB share against a blob storage back end. This allows you to do standard file IO operations instead of custom blob storage code. See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2014/05/12/introducing-microsoft-azure-file-service.aspx which shows how to create the file share in Windows and Linux VMs.

Answer 2

[Probably easier to give an answer here]

BlobStorage is a universal storage container that can effectively act as the common drive you are looking for. Access to the blob storage container is made over HTTP / HTTPS either through a BlobStorage Client or over REST, where you will have functions to upload, download, list objects, etc.

For Python, you'll hopefully find this article sufficient although I've no experience with Python on Azure to comment, or if choosing REST and http requests - that should work fine.

HTH