Manage tiered storage in app code

  • 5 minutes

You can configure and manage Azure Storage in code. This means you can create your own apps to take advantage of storage tiers.

Using the manufacturing-company example, you'd now like to plan for creating some custom applications to manage your documentation lifecycle.

In this unit, you'll compare the methods for configuring and managing storage tiers using several programming environments. You don't need to execute any of the steps in this unit; you'll do that in the next unit.

C# (.NET)

In your project, import the Azure.Storage.Blobs package using NuGet.

Add the following using directives to your code:

using Azure;
using Azure.Storage.Blobs;
using Azure.Storage.Blobs.Models;

The Azure SDK allows you to list all of the blobs in a blob container along with the properties of each blob, including the storage tier.

The following code shows how to use the GetBlobsAsync method on BlobClientContianer to get a collection of BlobItem objects. The BlobItem object encapsulates the properties of the blob in Azure storage, but doesn't contain the actual blob data.

AsyncPageable<BlobItem> blobItems = blobContainerClient.GetBlobsAsync();

await foreach (var blobItem in blobItems)
{
    Console.WriteLine($"Blob name {blobItem.Name}:   Tier {blobItem.Properties.AccessTier}");
}

If you're only interested in the storage tier of a single blob and know the name of the blob, you can use the GetPropertiesAsync method on a BlobClient object that returns the blob's properties, including the storage tier.

BlobClient blobClient = blobContainerClient.GetBlobClient(blobName);

Response<BlobProperties> response = await blobClient.GetPropertiesAsync();
BlobProperties blobProperties = response.Value;
string accessTier = blobProperties.AccessTier?.ToString();

Console.WriteLine($"Blob name: {blobName}  Access tier: {accessTier}");

To change a blob's storage tier programmatically, use the SetAccessTier method on the BlobClient class.

BlobClient blobClient = blobContainerClient.GetBlobClient(blobName);
blobClient.SetAccessTier(AccessTier.Cool);

REST

The REST API provides the Set Blob Tier operation on a block blob. This operation is an HTTP PUT request with the following format:

https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer/myblob?comp=tier

The tier parameter is Archive, Cold, Cool, or Hot.

To retrieve the storage tier of a block blob, use the Get Blob Properties operation. This is an HTTP HEAD request (the contents of the blob are not returned, only a response header):

https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer/myblob

The x-ms-access-tier response header specifies the storage tier of the blob.