Is it possible to mount blob storage to my local machine for deployment?

Question

I have a build script that it would be very useful to configure to dump some files into Azure blob storage so they can be picked up by my Azure web role.

My preferred plan was to find some way of mounting the blob storage on my build server as a mapped drive and simply using Robocopy copy to copy the files over. This will involve the least ammount of friction as I already am deploying some files like this to other web servers using WebDrive.

I found a piece of software that will allow me to do that: http://www.gladinet.com/

However on further investigation I found that it needs port 80 to run without some hairy looking hacking about on the server.

So is there another piece of software I could use or perhaps another way I haven't considered, such as deploying the files to a local folder that is automagically synced with blob storage?

Update in response to @David Makogon

I am using http://waacceleratorumbraco.codeplex.com/ this performs 2 way synchronisation between the blob storage and the web roles. I have tested this with http://cloudberrylab.com/ and I can deploy files manually to the blob and they are deployed correctly to the web roles. Also I have done the reverse and updated files in the web roles which have then been synced back to the blob and I have subsequently edited/downloaded them from blob storage.

What I'm really looking for is a way to automate the cloudberry side of things. So I don't have a manual step to copy a few files over. I will investigate the Powershell solutions in the meantime.

Answer 1

I know this is an old post - but in case someone else comes here... the answer is now "yes". I've been working on a CodePlex project to do exactly that. (All source code is available).

http://azuredrive.codeplex.com/

Answer 2

Mounting a cloud drive from a non-Windows Azure compute instance (e.g. your local build machine) is not supported.

Having said that: Even if you could mount a Cloud Drive from your build machine, your compute instances would need access to it too, and there can only be one writer. If your compute instances only needed read-only access, they'd need to create a snapshot after you upload new files.

This really doesn't sound like a good idea though. As knightpfhor suggested, the Cerebrata cmdlets provide this capability (look at Import-File). This allows you to push individual files into their own blobs. You can optimize further by pushing a single ZIP file into a blob. You can then use a technique similar to the one described by Nate Totten in his multi-tenant web role sample, to detect new zip files and expand them to your local storage. Nate's blog post is here.

Oh, and if you don't want to use the Cerebrata cmdlets, you can upload blobs directly with the Windows Azure Storage REST API (though the cmdlets are very simple to use and integrate seamlessly with PowerShell).

Answer 3

If you're comfortable using powershell in your build process then you could use the Cerebrata Cmdlets to upload the files. If that doesn't work for you, you could write a custom activity (but this sounds quite a bit more involved).