A very common query I get when storing files in Azure Cloud, is “Why are we using Blob Storage instead of File Storage. After all, aren’t we storing files?”. And it’s actually a pretty good question. And luckily, it has a very simple answer.

When To Use Azure File Storage

Azure File Storage is specifically used when storing files to be used like a managed file share. For example, if you are currently using a network share within your company on an old PC sitting under someone’s desk, you can move these files to the cloud using Azure File Storage, and have it act exactly the same as your current networked file share. Importantly, it supports both “Server Message Block (SMB)” and “Network File System (NFS)” protocols, so can be used across Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

While a company wide network share is obviously a good use case, another very common example is when you have an existing application (Such as a Windows Service) that you simply lift and shift onto a VM in Azure. If this application requires the use of a network share, instead of having to create a tunnel back into your office network, you can lift and shift the network share into Azure File Storage. Meaning minimal code rewrites, and making it a true lift and shift approach.

When To Use Azure Blob Storage

Azure Blob Storage is best used when storing unstructured or binary data in the cloud, and you don’t need access to it via Windows Explorer or other SMB protocols. Realistically, this means if you are storing files for your application, that are then read back via that same application, Azure Blob Storage will suffice.

It should be noted that there are Windows applications and addons that will make a blob storage account act like a file share, but it’s not recommended as some features that are available on Azure File Storage are not available on Blob and vice versa. If your main use case for moving files into Azure is to have them act as a network file share, you should use Azure File Storage instead of Blob.

File vs Blob Pricing

The other very important thing to note is that there are pricing differences between Azure File Storage and Azure Blob Storage. Sometimes it can be in the cents per GB, but often the transaction costs are vastly different on the File Storage side. For example write operations will cost you 30% more on Azure File Storage.

While it does pay to check pricing, your use case should dictate which option you go for rather than any cost difference.

While many things in Azure have straight forward “Spin this up, pay this per hour” type pricing models, Azure SQL is not one of them! While it does have the option of paying per hour, per database, per machine size, that’s only one of many ways to use Azure SQL. So I thought it would be worth talking through how pricing works with Azure SQL, and hopefully make it a little simpler to find the right option for you.

Before we get started, I just want to note that when I say Azure SQL, I am referring specifically to Microsoft SQL Server in the cloud. Things like Postgres on Azure are named “Postgres for Azure SQL”, but if you see Azure SQL on it’s lonesome, it means that it’s referring to SQL Server. Easy!

With that out of the way, let’s get started!

Single Database vs Elastic Pool

The first decision you are going to have to make is whether you are going to use a Single Database (Or many Single Databases), or use an Elastic Pool.

Single Database is exactly how it sounds, it’s a price per single database you spin up. It’s important to note this is *not* a single server, but a single database. So if your application uses two databases, for example one for transactional data and another just used for logging, then you will pay for two different AzureSQL databases. The benefit however is that each database has it’s own resources dedicated to it, and therefore they are isolated from one another. A downside is that if your application uses multiple databases (For example a single tenant SAAS application that uses a database per customer), then your costs are going to sky rocket.

Elastic Pools are a collection of SQL databases that share computing power, and pay for a “pool” of resources. Elastic Pools do start with higher pricing than Single Databases (e.g. The minimum spend is much larger than that of a single database), but if you have a data model that requires spinning up multiple databases (And possibly spinning them down), then Elastic Pools are for you. I would note that Elastic Pools also have other factors to consider (e.g. Max DTU sizes), and the shared resources can sometimes be more of a hindrance than a help. For that reason, I only recommend using Elastic Pools when you truly do have a “pool” of databases, like that of a single tenant SAAS application, and to not use Elastic Pools to save a few dollars on hosting costs for your 3 databases in production.

DTU Pricing Model

DTU stands for “Database Transaction Unit”. It’s taking measures of CPU, Memory and IO and combining them into a single metric. That makes it hard to talk about because the first question I usually get fired back when talking about DTU’s is “So how many CPU’s is that? How much memory?”. And the answer is… We don’t know. Or more so, because it’s a blended metric, 1DTU could be comprised of almost all memory and very little CPU, or it could be completely vice versa!

That’s actually one of the benefits of DTU. It’s a single “processing power” metric without having to juggle exact memory or CPU sizes. If you’ve ever had to grab a VM that has a huge amount of memory, but very little CPU, and it’s left you saying “Well.. I just want to increase the CPU, but not the memory, but the next VM class up doubles the memory!”, then that’s why DTUs are in some ways very powerful.

However, clearly a blended metric hides exactly what you are purchasing and for some people that’s a deal breaker. It makes it hard to understand initial provisioning sizes because at first, you will have nothing to compare it to. However, vertical scaling is absolutely no issue with Azure SQL, and so starting low and working your way up is always an option.

vCore Pricing Model

As an alternative to DTU pricing, you can still purchase Azure SQL using the vCore Pricing Model. vCore is your standard Azure SQL on hardware pricing where you know exactly how many CPU Cores and Memory you are being given. It’s great if you know exactly the computing power you need, or prefer the transparency of resourcing over the DTU pricing model.

Under vCore, there is actually two additional options. There is a price per core model, that is great for unpredictable workloads that may need to scale multiple times per day. Under this model, you simply pay per CPU core, per hour. And that’s it!

As an alternative, there is a “standard” set of machines available that are essentially built into your standard “tier” sizes. e.g.  2 Core 10GB, 4 Core 20GB vCore machines. These are great if you know the computing power you need and it won’t need to scale vertically that often.

DTU vs vCore

Unfortunately, after reading all of this you may come to the conclusion that you want to use vCore for it’s transparency, so that you know exactly what you’re getting. And Microsoft knows it, that’s why they’ve put the minimum provisioned vCore Azure SQL prices at around $400 USD per month (depending on region)! There is no lightweight entry into using the vCore pricing model, it’s almost an all or nothing approach.

On the DTU side of things, pricing can start for as little as $15 USD per month (depending on region), and the price step ups are much more granular, making it a much more viable solution for small start-ups and small businesses that just need a single database in the cloud.

Other options include using a DTU pricing model for Dev/Test workloads, and using a vCore model for Production. Again, this works great but only if you are happy with the minimum spend per month for (possibly) far more computing power than you need.

In the end, DTU vs vCore is less about pricing models and how resources are allocated, and more about the minimum level of pricing. In the majority of cases, DTU pricing is the way to go simply so you can start smaller, and ramp up over time.

When using Azure API Manager, one of it’s benefits is the ability to respond to certain API requests without having to ping your backend for the response. Essentially short circuiting API responses and offloading that computer power to a simple API management layer. In this case, we are specifically talking about being able to respond to a browser’s OPTIONS request (e.g. using CORS), without your entire application pipeline kicking into gear.

Now like most things, there are multiple ways to achieve the same result. So we are first going to talk about how we can get API manager to respond to the request without involving your backend API at all, but later we will also show you how you can allow a pass through to your API if you prefer to manage CORS configuration inside your application code, rather than API manager.

Using A CORS Policy

If you’re looking for the most hands off approach possible, your best bet is to use a CORS Inbound Policy within APIM. Previously, you had to manage most of this via XML copy and paste, but now there is an easy configuration wizard to follow. Inside Azure API Manager, select your API, All Operations, then go ahead and select “Add Policy” on Inbound processing.

On the next screen, find the option to “Allow cross-origin resource sharing (CORS)” as shown below

By default, the options presented to you will only be to select the “Allowed origins”, which is defaulted to *. I highly recommend instead to select the “Full” options and complete them. If you use Basic, by default, it will only allow GET and POST requests. This might be OK for some API’s, but generally modern applications make use of things like PUT, DELETE and PATCH.

After saving the configuration on this screen, your API manager will actually “short circuit” all OPTIONS requests and respond with these options defined here. Meaning that your backend service never has to put in computing power for trivial requests again!

Under the hood, using this wizard actually just adds the following custom policy to the inbound policy XML :

<cors>
  <allowed-origins>
    <origin>*</origin>
  </allowed-origins>
  <allowed-methods>
    <method>GET</method>
    <method>POST</method>
    <method>PUT</method>
    <method>DELETE</method>
  </allowed-methods>
</cors>

You may find guides around Azure API manager that still refer to pasting in this XML manually via the Azure Portal, and it’s still a valid way to do it, but for the most part Azure has added a tonne of quick wizards that essentially do the same thing, but don’t involve you having to do janky notepad copy and pastes all over the place.

Using A Wildcard OPTIONS Request

This is actually the default when you add a backend service like an Azure App Service to APIM via the wizard, instead of mapping each endpoint manually. When you do this, it actually creates a wildcard OPTIONS operation that does nothing but pass every request to your backend.

If this wildcard operation doesn’t show for you, simply create a new operation for OPTIONS that has a wildcard URL as depicted above.

After doing this, it will be up to your application to respond to OPTIONS requests. This means that your application is now getting hit when APIM could take the load off for you, but it does mean that you have more fine grain control if you prefer to manage CORS from within your existing application code rather than Azure API Manager.

Map Individual OPTIONS Requests

Instead of using a wildcard operation inside APIM, you can of course map each endpoint individually. In some cases this may be more effort than it’s worth but if you want complete fine grain control over what requests are forward to your application, this is an option.

I personally try and avoid this as it it essentially means duplicating each request to add an OPTIONS operation. If you are looking at doing this for security reasons, then in my opinion the use of a CORS inbound policy, and making the attack surface area be handled by Azure API Manager, is a much better option.

There has been a boom in recent years of people falling in love with static site generators such as Hugo, Jekyll and Gatsby to name a few. Along with this, there has been a need for cheap static website hosting with little (to no) compute power required. After all, there’s no reason to spin up a huge VM to serve a couple of HTML pages!

Azure has entered the fray with their option titled “App Service Static Web Apps”, which is really just the ability to use blob storage to serve files as a website, under a custom domain. Officially, it’s still under preview at the time of writing, but it’s still a very solid service for hosting static websites of any size. On top of this, it can be a great place to host front ends of your single page application, built in Angular, React, or Vue, that can then call directly into an App Service or Function written in your favourite backend programming language.

Let’s get started!

Configuring App Service Static Web Apps

Head to your Azure Storage Account via the Azure Portal, and select the “Static Website” option under the left hand settings menu.

Then go ahead and enable your static website. You will be given a primary endpoint, and have the option to enter a index file name, and an error file name. These  are the files that blob storage should serve when someone hits the index of your site, and when a user requests a file that doesn’t exist (404), respectively.

For static websites, it will likely be index.html and something like 404.html, however for front end frameworks such as Angular, you will want to direct the “error” page to the index also as all requests should be directed to the root page, irrespective of the URL, for Angular routing to handle the request. In this context, a 404 is whether a physical file exists in blob storage with a particular URL, not whether your angular application has a route for the URL.

In the end, things should end up looking a bit like below :

Also notice the message about a container being created for you, this does exactly what it says on the tin! If we hit save and check our containers within the account, we will see Azure has created a container named $web. Uploading content to this will automatically be served under our primary endpoint URL on the previous screen.

Deploying via Azure Devops/AZCopy

If you are using Azure Devops to deploy your code, then you already have an inbuilt way to send files to your blob storage account.

Consider the following YAML :

- task: AzureFileCopy@4
  inputs:
    sourcePath: '$(Pipeline.Workspace)/FileFolder/*'
    azureSubscription: '$(serviceConnectionNameHere)'
    destination: 'AzureBlob'
    storage: '$(storageAccountName)'
    containerName: '$web'

Nice and easy! If you are using the classic editor instead of YAML, the same “AzureFileCopy” task is available to you via the GUI.

It’s also extremely important to note that AZCopy by default will try and guess mimetypes on your files. This is a good thing! However in various versions of both AZCopy, and the AzureFileCopy task, this can be easily accidentally overridden. For example, in some versions of the AzureFileCopy task, it will guess the mimetype *unless* you pass in additional flags, in which case it will automatically stop guessing mimetypes.

There is no one size fits all solution as different versions of the task, and AZCopy behave differently. But if you are finding that your files are not being uploaded with the correct mimetypes, or you are finding that your files “download” in your browser instead of being rendered in the browser, it’s likely an issue of AZCopy not guessing mimetypes correctly.

Adding A Custom Domain

Adding a custom domain is actually very simple, simply take your favourite domain provider and create a CNAME record between your domain, and your “zX.web.core.windows.net” primary endpoint domain. That’s it! It’s highly recommended to use Azure CDN in front of your static website which can help with handling of custom domains and HTTPS, but it’s not a hard requirement and for many Dev/Test scenarios, using the primary endpoint directly is more than sufficient.

What About ARM Templates?

At the time of writing, and probably owing to the fact that the service is in preview, users are currently unable to configure Static Web Applications via ARM Templates. While the storage account itself can be created via template, the actual configuration of a Static Web Application, including even the ability to turn the feature on, is required to be done via the Azure Portal.