Consumer web applications today need to be web-scale to handle the increasing traffic requirements. One of the key components of the contemporary web application architecture is storage. Social networking and media sites are dealing with massive user generated content that is growing disproportionately. This is where Cloud storage can help. By leveraging the Cloud storage effectively, applications can scale better.
Windows Azure Storage has multiple offerings in the form of Blob, Table and Queues. Blob are used to store binary objects like images, videos and other static assets while Table is used for dealing with the flexible, schema-less entities. Queues allow asynchronous communication across the role instances and components of Cloud applications.
In this article, we will see how PHP developers can talk to Azure Blob storage to store and retrieve objects. Before that, let’s understand the key concepts of Azure Blobs.
Azure Blobs are a part of Windows Azure Storage accounts. If you have a valid Windows Azure account, you can create a storage account to gain access to the Blobs, Tables and Queues. Storage accounts come with a unique name that will act as a DNS name and storage access key that is required for authentication. Storage account will be associated with the REST endpoints of Blobs, Tables and Queues. For example, when I created a Storage account named janakiramm, the Blob endpoint is http://janakiramm.blob.core.windows.net. This endpoint will be used to perform Blob operations like creating and deleting containers and uploading objects.
