Developing Cloud Applications with Windows Azure Storage: Blobs
- 3/15/2013
- Blob basics
- Blob containers
- Blob addressing
- Business use cases
- Blob storage structure
- Navigating blob container hierarchies
- Storage Client library blob types
- Container and blob naming rules
- Performing create, read, update, and delete blob operations
- Shared Access Signatures and shared access policies
- Blob attributes and metadata
- Conditional operations
- Blob leases
- Using block blobs
- Using page blobs
- Blob snapshots
- Continuation tokens and blobs
- Conclusion
Blob addressing
Blob resources are located in data storage via URLs that match this pattern: http://<account>.blob.core.windows.net/<container>/<blobname>. The <account> placeholder is the Windows Azure account name, <container> is the blob’s container name, and <blobname> is the name of the blob (for example, http://wintellect.blob.core.windows.net/pictures/Employee.jpg).
When using the local development storage emulator, the URL pattern is slightly different. The hostname becomes the IP address of the loopback adapter (that is, 127.0.0.1), to which the port number 10000 and the hardcoded literal account name devstorageaccount1 are appended to form the complete base address, as depicted in the Storage Emulator window shown in Figure 5-1. The container name and blob name are appended to this base address to form the full URL of a resource (for example, http://127.0.0.1:10000/devstorageaccount1/pictures/Employee.jpg).
){kind=link}
Figure 5-1 The IP address is shown in the Windows Azure Storage Emulator window.