Previous

Next

Exercise - Create Azure storage resources

Completed

After you have an idea about how you're going to store data across storage accounts, containers, and blobs, you can think about the Azure resources you'll need to create to support the app.

Storage accounts

Storage account creation is an administrative/management activity that takes place before deploying and running your app. Accounts are created by a deployment or environment setup script, an Azure Resource Manager template, or manually by an admin. Generally, apps other than administrative tools shouldn't have permissions to create storage accounts.

Containers

Unlike storage account creation, container creation is a lightweight activity that makes sense to perform from within an app. It's not uncommon for apps to create and delete containers as part of their work.

For apps that rely on a known set of containers with hard-coded or preconfigured names, the typical practice is to let the app create the containers it needs on startup or first usage if they don't already exist. Letting your app create containers instead of doing it as part of your app's deployment eliminates the need for both your app and your deployment process to know the names of the containers the app uses.

Exercise

You're going to complete an unfinished app by adding code to use Azure Blob Storage. This exercise is more about exploring the Blob Storage API than about designing an organization and naming scheme, but here's a quick overview of the app and how it stores data.

Your app works like a shared folder that accepts file uploads and makes them available for download. It doesn't use a database for organizing blobs; instead, it sanitizes the names of uploaded files and uses them as blob names directly. All uploaded files are stored in a single container.

The code you'll start with compiles and runs, but the parts responsible for storing and loading data are empty. After you complete the code, you'll deploy the app to Azure App Service and test it.

Let's set up the storage infrastructure for your app.

Storage account

You'll use Azure Cloud Shell with the Azure CLI to create a storage account. You'll need to provide a unique name for the storage account—make a note of it for later. Replace [your-unique-storage-account-name] with a name you choose.

To create the storage account, run this command. Remember to enter your unique storage account name in the code.

az storage account create \
  --kind StorageV2 \
  --resource-group <rgn>[sandbox resource group name]</rgn> \
  --location eastus \
  --name [your-unique-storage-account-name]

Container

The app you'll be working with in this module uses a single container. You're going to follow the best practice of letting the app create the container at startup. However, you can create containers from the Azure CLI. If you'd like to see the documentation, run the az storage container create -h command in Cloud Shell.

Continue