Import and export data to Azure

1. Moving Large Files

So one of the most common questions you'll receive is how to transfer massive amounts of data into or out of the storage account. So if we go into the storage Explorer, as we were, we upload a single file from our computer using this web browser. Certainly not the ideal way to move files. I mean, this is interesting and it's easy to do, but if you really had a lot of files that you wanted to move terabytes or multiple terabytes of files, your web browser is not a very good way to do that. The way that Azure handles massive amounts of data is called an import or export job. We go back home to all our services. We can actually just scroll down. So there's a big list of services in the storage section of all services. And you can import and export jobs under storage. Let's go in there. Now, I don't have any import or export jobs, but I can certainly create one. So let's start with an import job. That's like, maybe the easier one to explain. Let's imagine that we had a massive amount in our Blob account and we wanted to just sort of download all the files from our storage account. We're going to fire that off as a job. Okay, use my existing subscription.

And this job is going to exist in a resource group. So I'm just going to choose the existing resource group. Now, we do need to choose the data and the destination. So choose the storage account. Now, one thing you're going to notice is that this screen only supports storage account version one. So we created a storage account, V two. However, this portal's import and export do not support V two. So I created a V-One storage account and I called it Another New. Okay, it's going to basically be brand new. I want to export all the data from that storage account. Microsoft will now take this data, place it on a hard drive, andata box, and ship it to me. So basically, I'm going to choose FedEx. I'm going to enter my FedEx business account number, my personal details, street address, et cetera. And basically, I can basically get this hard drive to me through the postal service.

Finally, once I'm done with it, Microsoft is going to export the data, put it onto this disk, and FedEx it to me. I'm going to receive it. I'm going to copy that data from the hard disc into my environment, and I'm going to have to basically ship them their box back. Okay, so this is called an Azure data box. Let me do the Azure data box. There are many different sizes and capacities of the Azure data box. Everything in this section is the 100 terabyte option. There's a single disc up to eight terabytes, and you can get five of them up to 40 terabytes. And finally, they've got this massive storage container. It's got wheels. It has up to one petabyte of data. Okay, so you basically, Microsoft, will send this to you. You get your data off of it, and then you ship it back to them. Now the same in reverse. Okay? If I go out of this, I'm going to cancel my job. If I were to import a job, I'm going to give it a name. So when importing data, the job itself exists within the resource group.

And the thing is, I need to prepare what's called a journal file. Now, this import and export tool is called WA.Import and export v one.I have a link here so we can download this tool. This tool prepares your hard disc in your local environment for uploading to Azure through its data box service. So you have to download the software. You have to run it and it will generate what's called a journal file. And so it's going to, you're going to upload the journal file here. Okay, It's going to then know what data that you want. Again, you can choose your destination. It only supports storage account v1 in this instance. And then it's basically going to ship me out an empty data box and I'm going to add my data into it. And then I'm going to ship it back to them. And then Microsoft is going to take the data, put it into the storage account as requested, and then notify us that the data is okay. So the WA Import Export software is required in order to pair your local files to be uploaded. So this is basically when you've got data that's so big that five terabytes or eight terabytes, you don't want to use your browser to upload it. Then you're going to basically ship a hard disc through FedEx.

2. Blob Storage

So coming up next, we're going to talk about blob storage accounts. We've been working with General Storage up till now, but we're going to talk specifically about how you have a blob storage account style. So Azsjd's new blob It's going to the same resource group. I'm going to put this one in the eastern US. Now, you'll see, they don't have access to the ability to switch to premium storage for blob storage accounts. OK, I'm going to put that as locally redundant storage. You have access to the choice between hot and cold. Secure HTTP is required. It's all the same questions that we're getting from creating generals at this point.

And so I'm going to hit create. So that took about 28 seconds, and the storage account is complete. Let's go into the storage account. Now, we can see here that it's got its own type. It's called blob storage. We don't have any access to files, tables, or queues. We only have access to blobs. If we were to create a container,we could call it a test container. And when we choose the access level, we can basically allow anonymous read access for blobs. So now, when we put files into our task container, we can basically request those files over the internet with no secure access signature, and so on. So we're going to do what we did last time.

We're going to upload a file into it,say upload it worked, close that, I guess. And we should be able to copy the URL, hit Control T, and have to access this file without any secure access signature or anything. As a result, we can now embed this anywhere on our website. We need to access a file that is on the public internet. We can now create a blob account, a container, upload us there, and use the URL without any authentication, security, et cetera. Now, of course, that's only dangerous when you are using files that you want to be secure. But if it's just for images for your website, you can certainly use that to store those files.

3. CDN

So we just saw that we could take a Blob storage account, put a bunch of files into it, and use this as the back-end service for our own website. We can serve those images, JavaScript files, PDFs, or anything that's static and unchanging can be served out of a Blob storage account. But that might not be the most efficient way to do it or the cheapest. Microsoft has another service called Content Delivered that is more optimized for serving static files to users around the world. So let's close out the storage account. Let's go into New, type the letter CDN, do a search, and we can see that the first result is CDN by Microsoft. This is also called a CDN profile. You'll see it in various places. Give it a name like JD New CDN and you do need to choose a resource group. So I'll choose one resource group or create a new one.

One thing to note is that you cannot select the location of the resource group because the CDN is a global resource. So the CDN, as an instance, does not live in any particular region. Microsoft takes care of serving that on a global basis. The profile is what lives in the region, but the service is a global service. The real trick to CDN is the pricing and various service options. So if I click this link, I can see there are four different service options in Canadian dollars. They range from five cents per gigabyte to ten cents to twenty cents. Pricing variation of one, two, or four factors This type of layout doesn't make it easy to compare the benefits of one versus another. So I'm going to switch over to the official Microsoft website and compare the CDN product features. Now I'm going to see this zoomed in one more time. So there are four additions.

There's the Microsoft edition. This is the newest thing. And there's Akamai. And then Verizon has a standard and a premium. Now I'm not going to go through these line by line, but I definitely recommend you check them out. But the difference, like Microsoft, is that Microsoft is the cheapest version of Horizon Premium, which is the most expensive, and that combined Verizon standard is the same price. So when we're talking about what the differences are, the ones that stand out are being able to use HTTPS with your own custom domain. So example.com as the CDN endpoint, kami doesn't support that HTTPS. Microsoft allows you to bring your own certificate. So if you are serving things in an encrypted fashion, you can basically upload the certificate. Microsoft loves its Azure Key vault to manage certificates.

They all tie into Azure Diagnostics. Verizon's premium service now includes more alerts, performance stats, and reports. I guess Verizon has its own website, I guess. So in the other two, you're stuck with Microsoft reports. The other thing about the premium Verizon, which is why you pay twenty cents per gigabyte, is that you have what's called a rule-based content delivery engine. So for the same URL, serve up different pieces of content. One example of that in these mobile device rules is that you could have a very high quality image that serves a desktop device and a smaller image that is optimized for mobile devices. Okay? So basically, being able to use your CDN more intelligently based on the device and also being able to thesaural rewrite, you're able to customize what appears in the URLfield even though behind the scenes the file might be stored in another location. customised URLs are the reason you pay twenty cents per gigabyte rather than five or ten. So these are the choices that we have. Now, Microsoft has come up with a very competitive offering.

Maybe the one thing Microsoft doesn't do is this dynamic site acceleration, which means that Akamai and Verizon are able to serve your website. They'll basically be the man in the middle between you and your website and they're able to do streaming image compression. So as your website image, it actually streams a lower compressed version to the end user, object refresh and things like that. So when your site has links to things on it,it will actually go and start to scrape those and prefetch those so they're as quickly as possible. So there are a couple of extra features that Microsoft does not support, but that Verizon or Akamai do. Let's close that up and we're going to choose Microsoft's three versions. It seems to have all the basic features and we don't have at least test a need to do that. Now we also have the option to create a new CDN endpoint.

A CDN endpoint is what we're going to link our storage account, maybe our public Blobstorage account, to this CDN network. So if I say Azshdtestn'edgenetand then I can link a storage account. Now we do have the NRL that wants Azure Web App, other Azure services, or storage accounts as being the options. Now, The Blob is SG's new Blob. So now, even within the creation of the CDN,I can point it to my storage account. Never mind that you can have multiple endpoints, so you're not just restricted to this one, but this is the first one. So we're going to create a Microsoft endpoint, this Blob storage account. Let's give it a second. All right, so that worked. I actually ended up having to create it in a different resource group because my other resources just gave me trouble with this CDN. But I created a different one. It worked fine. And so we'll see how the top level CDM profile looks like after I actually added an end point to it. I'm going to open up the endpoint, and the endpoint basically has a public URL name and it basically points to an origin, which is my storage account. And just to be clear, it only needs to access the file once (from that point forward, it's cached in the CDN). So it basically pulls it to the file once and, from that point forward, it's stored in the CDN. Now you'll notice this button. So once the CDN starts caching files, it might come to the point where it's out of date and you wish you could update it. Let's say it's an image and somehow it has been updated and you can't change the URL of it. Well, some points to purging your CDNso you can just click the button.

There's also a set of custom rules that you can set where it ignores query strings. Basically, if something is a query string, it doesn't cache that uniquely, et cetera. Back up here, I'm going to hit the purge button, so we're going to purge all the tents in this CDN. So now it's basically emptying its memory and the next time I request a file, it's going to go back to the storage account. I'm going to copy this hosting the endpoint and open a new one. If I go to the endpoint like this, I'm going to get resources that do not exist. Well, that is the same message.

I'm going to copy the origin. That's the same message that I'm going to get if I go directly to the storage account origin once I take the file name. So we got my Blob images, Azure Edge net, and I'm going to put my file name, see boom. It has pulled in the file name from my storage account, but from now on, if I hit five ffiveffive, it is cached within the CDN network rather than returning to my storage account. Okay, so that's how CDN works, and we can do some things like compression optimization extra. I think the basics of what you need to know for this test are: how the CDN is created, how CDN endpoints are created, that the CDN works globally,it's not a particular resource group, et cetera.

Configure Azure files

1. Create Azure file share

So up till now, we've been using the Azure storage account and we've been using the blobs in there. Now blobs are marked to go into a container. You create one or more containers and you can file them. It doesn't really have a proper file structure even though it stimulates one. But there are many limitations. You can't mount your Blob container to your computer or to your server. The proper way to deal with files in terms of mounting and in terms of treating them as files and folders is through the Azure files. Azure Files is now a feature of a regular storage account. So I'm going to go ahead and create a new store. For Azure files, I can skip through most of these requirements. I'm not going to tag it. So we're going to create a regular storage and a general purpose storage account, and then we're going to be able to use a file service.

All right, we're going to go into the resource and you'll see we've got our blobs, files, and tables and this time we're going to talk about files. Now, by default, there are no file shares. So this is a can container of a blob. You have to create your first file share. So I'm going to call this temp Files. You could also define a total file share for us, just like a regular hard drive. So I'm going to basically put 1.TB on this file share. Now I have a file share that I can start creating folders and files on. So now we have the additional ability to add directories, et cetera.

One of the advantages of using a file share is that you can connect to it and use it just like a mounted network drive on your own computer. So if I click this connect button, I can see that it's going to let me pick a drive letter. So if I want to use this as a particular drive, So Microsoft is giving us a few different ways to connect to this file share. One is through PowerShell. So they've given us a PowerShell command that we can run in a PowerShell window. The other is through the Windows traditional net use command, which will allow us to mount this drive as a drive letter. And if you're running a form of Linux, then you can use this pseudo mount command for this as well. Now I should warn you, I'm going to copy one.

I should warn you in advance that many ISPs,including Comcast in the United States and Rogers here in Canada, And others block port four-four five so that no communication can travel over their networks over that port. And others use ports four, four, and five for file shares. The reason for this is that a lot of home users, particularly when they might actually leave their computer open and the sharing of their C drive or their D drive open. As a result, this is the simplest way for hackers to gain access to your computer. So the ISP will just turn that off for residential users. So I'm not going to be able to mount this, but there is a way around this. We're going to talk about file sync coming up. But basically, we can mount our files using file sync.

On a corporate network, however, you should be able to use either netus or traditional PowerShell. Here this. And basically, you end up with a drive that you or anyone can mount and then share files. One of the best uses for this is when you have multiple servers that have ten servers in a load balancing configuration but need a set of files that they can all share. And so you create one file mount, you mount all of these on those servers, and then they can just write their log files there. They can put their temporary files, their images, etc. So it becomes a central file repository for servers. very popular use of the Azure file service.

2. Azure File Sync

Microsoft provides a service called Azure File Sync that allows synchronizing files from our local servers with the cloud and with other servers. So think of it as basically anreplication service for shared files between offices across the globe or wherever. The first step of setting up Azure File Syncis to download a file sync agent. You need to get this downloaded on your local server, and it basically allows your files, which are on your local machine, to be kept in sync with the Azure file share. You go into the Azure Portal, you can search for Azure File Sync, and you'll see that Azure File Sync is a service. We're going to hit Create. Give me the service. The name is JD. File sync is chosen in the resource group and location. Click Create. And so this is going to create a storage sync service in this resource, which is sort of the orchestrator, the manager of the file sync between your local directories.

Now, that only took a few seconds. The home of your file sync is what's called a sync group. A sync group is basically a set of files that are going to be kept synchronized across multiple servers. So for each file share that you want to have synchronized, you're going to create a sync group. So I'll just call this new Sync group pays you Go prescription. Now I have to put this into a storage account. So we created Vile share previously. If you haven't created one, you might want to consider one. And we need to basically have a share within the file share that is going to be kept in sync. So remember that whatever files are synced to the sync group are going to be in this file share. So that's the basis of a sync group. Now, the other key concept besides sync groups is that once you've installed the Azure File sync agent on your server, you need to install it, and then you need to configure it, which is called a server registration, to get those to synchronize from your server into the Azure file service. Okay? And so, again, this is a way around the block.

If you've got a block for portfolio for five, basically, by having the software running on your computer, it can synchronize the files as you specify into the cloud. And then the more Azure file sync agents that you install on various computers, if you synchronize them to the same sync group, then they're all going to get copies of those files. So think of this as a way of having four or five servers around the world with the same Azure file sync agent installed, synchronized to the same sync group. And Azure is going to take care of making sure all of the files in those directories are synchronized with each other.

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