Sunday 20 November 2016

How to get started with development in the cloud for free: tools for blob storage development

Introduction
Getting started in the cloud might be an overwhelming experience. When you are learning to work with the cloud, you also want to keep your development costs as low as possible. Therefore I will present with this and the following blog a use case that will allow you to write your first cloud blog storage program at no cost. We will use for this the cloud offering of Microsoft which is called Azure. 

The use case will exist of uploading a file to the cloud so that a special cloud service would be able to process this file and return the processed result which you eventually can download again.

In this first blog I will present all the different development tools that you need to develop this use case. We will use an emulator for the cloud in this way you can postpone starting to use your free Azure credits when you have a better idea about your first cloud project. 



What is Blob Storage
Blob storage is a service for storing large amounts of data or files in the cloud. Such files are called blobs in the cloud. You can see this as your personal hard drive in the cloud. These files can be made accessible through http or https and you can make them publicly available to the world or you can use it to store private application data. 

To be able to use blob storage in the cloud, you need a storage account. In your storage account you will have containers what you can compare with directories on your computer that are storing the blobs. If you would store a blob file myblob on the account myaccount, in container mycontainer

The url of this blob looks as follows: https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer/myblob . The equivalent of this on your windows account myuser is a file myfile in directory mydirectory is the file C:\Users\myuser\Documents\mydirectory\myblob.

The blob storage emulator will in this case also emulate the storage account. 


Use case
We are building the application that is shown in the picture below. We have locally on our computer the file C:\test_files\Awesome_local_file.txt. We have a web service in the cloud that performs a special operation on this file that we can't perform on our file locally. Therefore we will need to upload the Awesome_local_file.txt to my_container as the blob larf_YYYYMMDDHHmm.txt . In this way the Web service will be able to access the file and perform his operation on it. The web service will provide as output the olarf_YYYYMMDDHHmm.txt file which it will store in the container mycontainer. Afterwards you will be able to download this file back to your computer as Awesome_output.txt



Needed free resources for blob storage development
Development Environment
This part is based on Get started with Azure Blob storage using .NET  As the development environment we will use Visual Studio. Visual Studio Community is a free version of Visual Studio. 

When you have installed Visual Studio, open Visual Studio and select New Project in the left column and select a new Visual C# Console Application as demonstrated in the picture below and press OK.




When you have created your project, you will need to add some extra libraries. You will be able to do this with the Nuget Package Manager. You can launch it by Selecting Nuget Package Manager from the Tools menu. Next you can select the Nuget Package Manager Console.






In the console in the bottom type the following two commands



  • Install-Package WindowsAzure.Storage
  • Install-Package Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ConfigurationManager
Azure Storage Emulator

For this use case we will use a blob storage emulator, this will mean that your computer will emulate the blob storage environment in the cloud locally and you don't need to generate an Azure account yet. To be able to use the Azure Storage Emulator, you first will need to have an instance of SQL Server installed.  A free option is offered in SQL Server 2016 Express

When SQL Server has been successfully installed, you will be able to install the Azure Storage Emulator. When you have installed the storage emulator you can start it from the program menu. You will see a command window similar such as the one below when everything has run correctly.


Authenticating requests against the storage emulator
The benefit of using the storage emulator is that the account name and the account key are the same for all the developers using the storage emulator, so these ones don't need to be kept secret. These values are: 
Account name: devstoreaccount1
Account key: Eby8vdM02xNOcqFlqUwJPLlmEtlCDXJ1OUzFT50uSRZ6IFsuFq2UVErCz4I6tq/K1SZFPTOtr/KBHBeksoGMGw==

When you want to use this emulator in Visual Studio, you need to put the following values in the app.config file. But we will cover this more in the next blog when we are building up the use case.




Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer
To be able to access your files in storage with a desktop application similar to Windows Explorer, you can install Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer,  To connect to your storage emulator, use the Account key Eby8vdM02xNOcqFlqUwJPLlmEtlCDXJ1OUzFT50uSRZ6IFsuFq2UVErCz4I6tq/K1SZFPTOtr/KBHBeksoGMGw== and the account name devstoreaccount1

The Microsoft Azure Storage Explore will look now like the picture below. 


Conclusion
Congratulations, now you have set up all the different parts to be able to get started with blog storage. In the next blog we will show step by step how you can build the use case. Good luck with your journey to the cloud.

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