Store a large volume of scanned images to the cloud for further proccessing by a custom web application

Question

I am going to produce about 3TB of scanned images that I want to upload to the cloud for further processing. The scanned images will be jpg files that are going to be saved in a local NAS and periodically uploaded to the cloud. Their metadata will be stored in a relational database. Later the scanned images will be processed through a custom web application and will retrieve them one by one along with their metadata. The processing of each image will produce data that will be stored in a relational database. It is essential to preserve the directory structure of NAS in the cloud too. I found Azure Blob Storage as a possible solution. Could be an efficient and economical choice or is there an better one?

Answer 1

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A platform and thanks for posting your question here.

Azure Blob Storage could be a good choice for your use case. It is designed for storing massive amounts of unstructured data, such as your scanned images. Here are some reasons why Azure Blob Storage might be a good fit:

1. Scalability: Azure Blob Storage can handle large amounts of data, so it should be able to accommodate your 3TB of scanned images.
2. Data Accessibility: Users or client applications can access objects in Blob Storage via HTTP/HTTPS, from anywhere in the world. This could be useful for your web application that needs to retrieve images one by one.
3. Integration with Azure Functions: If your further processing involves any serverless computation, Azure Functions can be triggered by events in Blob Storage which is one of the integrations from many.
4. Preserving Directory Structure: Azure Blob Storage supports a virtual directory structure which can be used to organize blobs. This can help you preserve the directory structure of your NAS in the cloud.
5. Cost-Effective: Azure Blob Storage offers different access tiers, which allow you to choose the best balance between performance and cost. For example, you could use the hot tier for frequently accessed data and the cool or archive tiers for less frequently accessed data.

However, you should also consider the following:

Data Transfer Costs: While Azure Blob Storage itself is relatively inexpensive, transferring data into and out of Azure (egress) can incur additional costs. You'll need to factor this into your cost calculations. Performance: Depending on the scale of your operations and the size of your images, you may need to consider the performance implications of retrieving and processing images from Blob Storage. Please refer

1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blobs-introduction
2. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/details/storage/blobs/#pricing

Hope this helps.

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