Can I have Azure File Storage with Web App Service?

Question

I'm new to Azure, using a free 30 day trial. We are looking to move an existing ASP.NET website hosted on Godaddy to an Azure Web App Service.

The thing is, we have a folder in the ASP.NET website:

/files/image-store/ 

which holds thousands of sub folders with PNG's and JPEG's. These images are shown in various aspx webpages on our ASP.NET website. It's currently around 2GB but could grow to multiple TBs.

I notice the free plan on the Azure Web App Service only allows 1GB of storage. I've read the following:

"Azure Files provides a cloud-based file share for storing and sharing files. You then access these files from applications hosted in Azure App Service, an Azure VM, or an on-premises machine. Azure Files stores and shares file access between applications and systems in a secure and failure-resilient manner."   

But I also read on stack exchange that it only works on Linux with Azure App Service. Is this still the case, and if so, is there a workaround?

BTW, I have been suggested a Blob is another way though we have no experience with that, seems we would have to make changes to a lot of existing code, and also not I'm not sure how transportable that code would be to other hosting providers if ever desired.

Answer 1

@MarkB
See the documentation here for information on mounting Azure Files from App Service, this includes Windows instructions. There are limitations though which are noted on the page and this is still a Preview feature.

Hope this helps. Let us know if you have further issues or questions and we will be happy to help.

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Answer 2

Will this ever be available for Web Apps that are not in a container? We need this desperately. Where we can map a drive to external file share.