Azure Files Preview Update

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At Build 2015 we announced that technical support is now available for Azure Files customers with technical support subscriptions. We are pleased to announce several additional updates for the Azure Files service which have been made in response to customer feedback. Please check them out below:

New REST API Features

Server Side Copy File

Copy File allows you to copy a blob or file to a destination file within the Storage account or across different Storage accounts all on the server side. Before this update, performing a copy operation with the REST API or SMB required you to download the file or blob and re-upload it to its destination.

File SAS

You can now provide access to file shares and individual files by using SAS (shared access signatures) in REST API calls.

Share Size Quota

Another new feature for Azure Files is the ability to set the “share size quota” via the REST API. This means that you can now set limits on the size of file shares. When the sum of the sizes of the files on the share exceeds the quota set on the share, you will not be able to increase the size of the files in the share.

Get/Set Directory Metadata

The new Get/Set Directory Metadata operation allows you to get/set all user-defined metadata for a specified directory.

CORS Support

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) has been supported in the Blob, Table, and Queue services since November 2013. We are pleased to announce that CORS will now be supported in Files.

Learn more about these new features by checking out the Azure Files REST API documentation.

Library and Tooling Updates

The client libraries that support these new features are .NET (desktop), Node.JS, Java, Android, ASP.NET 5, Windows Phone, and Windows Runtime. Azure Powershell and Azure CLI also support all of these features – except for get/set directory metadata. In addition, the newest version of AZCopy now uses the server side copy file feature.

If you’d like to learn more about using client libraries and tooling with Azure Files then a great way to get started would be to check out our tutorial for using Azure Files with Powershell and .NET.

As always, if you have any feature requests please let us know by submitting your ideas to Azure Storage Feedback.

Thanks!

Azure Storage Team