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restazurestorage
Ezra Hoch
Ezra Hoch

Reputation: 1752

Is a HTTP REST request the only way to access Azure Storage?

I've started reading about Azure Storage and it seems that the only way to access it is via an HTTP REST request.

I've seen that there are a few wrappers around these requests, for example, StorageClient (by Microsoft) and cloud storage api (http://cloudstorageapi.codeplex.com/), but they all still use REST in the background (to the best of my understanding).

It seems unreasonable to me that this is actually true. If I have a machine in Azure, and I want to access data stored in Azure Storage, it would seem every inefficient to

Upvotes: 1

Views: 248

Answers (2)

Eugenio Pace
Eugenio Pace

Reputation: 14212

Throughput on the storage subsystem in Windows Azure is pretty high. I'd be very surprised if the system cannot deliver to your needs.

There are also many design patterns to increase scalability of your app, like asynch processing, batching requests, delayed processing, etc.

Upvotes: 0

Taylor Bird
Taylor Bird

Reputation: 8007

Yes, all storage calls are normalized to the REST API. Its actually very efficient when you consider the problem. You are thinking of a machine in Azure and data in azure as stored on two servers sitting in a rack. Remember in Azure, your data, your "servers", etc may be stored in different racks, different zones, and even different datacenters. With the REST API, your apps don't have to care about any of this. They just get the data with the URL.

So while a tiny HTTP overhead may appear inefficient if these were two boxes next to each other, its actually a very elegant solution when they are on different continents. Factor in concepts such as CDN, and it becomes an even better fit.

Layered onto this base concept is the Azure load balancer and other pieces of the internal infrastructure which can further optimize every request because they are all the same (HTTP). I also wouldn't be surprised (not sure at all, I dont work for MSFT) if the LB was doing traffic management optimizations when a request is made intra-datacenter.

Upvotes: 5

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