accessing a blob ; without using a webrole ?

Question

I wanted to knw if there is way we can upload /download a blob; add remove view metadata without using a webrole ? If my application has a lot of gui, shud there be multiple webroles ? everywhere I see webrole's file default.aspx.cs has everything to do with the blob based on a event ; which is perfectly fine, but what if my gui is more complicated ?

Answer 1

Blobs are accessible via REST calls, so you can actually manipulate blobs with a local desktop app if you wish, even written in PHP or Java.

As for webroles: each role is simply a virtual machine running on some server somewhere. Web roles are just like worker roles, with the addition of IIS. If you have a website, you can put the entire website in a single webrole. If you need to scale it to handle more users, you could create more than one "instance" of that webrole - and then all of your website's requests get sent to the various instances, each running the same code. (yes, you could have multiple webroles for a given app - this might be practical depending on your site's complexity, or if you have a completely different UI for administrators vs visitors).

Answer 2

You don't need to use a web role to access Azure Storage (Blob or otherwise). You can use a worker role, or you can even access it from a Windows Forms app running on a desktop, or a web/service app which isn't running on Azure.

See the Azure SDK's StorageClient documentation for info on how to access Azure Storage - it's pretty easy.