Storage Accounts
Cloud Storage Studio allows you to connect to one or more Azure Storage accounts simultaneously
so that you can browse the tables, queues & containers across multiple storage accounts together.
Furthermore you have an option of persisting the storage account information (storage account name
and key) on local file system so that you can connect to your storage account without inputting the
account name & key again. It also has a feature of auto connecting to your storage accounts on application
start up.
Cloud Storage Studio also supports connection to development storage.
Development storage
is a utility that simulates the Blob, Queue, and Table services available in the cloud. If you are building a
hosted service that employs storage services or writing any external application that calls storage services,
you can test locally against development storage. Development storage is a part of Windows Azure SDK.
Demo Video
Manage Tables & Entities
Azure table is the structured storage provided by the Windows Azure platform. It supports massively
scalable tables in the cloud, which can contain billions of entities and terabytes of data.
Using Cloud Storage Studio, you can:
- Create tables
- Delete tables
- List tables
- Create entities
- List entities
- Edit/update entities
- Delete entities
Other features include:
- Filter by PartitionKey
- Download Table Data in XML Format
- Upload Data From Microsoft SQL Server/MySQL Databases, XML
- Advanced Filtering Capabilities
Demo Video
Manage Containers & Blobs
Windows Azure Blob enables applications to store large objects, up to 50GB each in the cloud.
Current version of Cloud Storage Studio has limited support for containers & blobs. Following are
the features available in Cloud Storage Studio related to managing containers & blobs:
- Create blob containers
- Delete blob containers
- List blob containers
- Update blob container metadata
- Update blob container ACL
- List blobs
- Upload blobs - You can upload files from multiple directories from your computer to the cloud. You can drag files from windows explorer & drop them on the upload window to be added to the upload queue. You can also copy files/folders from your folder and paste them on the upload window to be added to upload queue. You can pause, resume or cancel upload operation as well.
- Download blobs - You can download one or more blobs stored in the cloud to your computer. You can pause, resume or cancel download operation as well.
- Delete blobs - You can delete one or more blobs stored in the cloud.
- Copy blobs - You can copy one or more blobs from one container to another container within one storage account. Copying blobs from one storage account to another will come later.
- Move blobs - You can move one or more blobs from one container to another within one storage account. Moving blobs from one storage account to another will come later.
- Rename blobs - Allows you to rename blobs without deleting & reuploading blobs.
- Generate signed URL for containers/blobs - This allows you to generate URLs for your blobs which automatically expire after a certain date/time. Current version of Cloud Storage Studio supports this feature.
- Blob Snapshots - This functionality allows you to take a read only copy of a blob at a particular moment of time. Using Cloud Storage Studio, you can Take blobs snapshots, List blobs snapshots, and Delete, View & Promote (i.e. replace the blob of which this snapshot is taken) blob snapshot.
- Page blobs - This functionality allows you to create empty page blobs or upload existing virtual hard drives (VHD) from your computer as page blobs which you can later mount as Windows Azure Drives to be used by your applications.
Demo Video
Manage Queues & Messages
Azure Queue provides a reliable message delivery mechanism. It provides a simple and asynchronous work
dispatch mechanism, which can be used to connect different components of a cloud application. Using Cloud Storage
Studio, you can:
- Create queues
- Delete queues
- List queues
- Edit queue metadata
- Create messages
- List messages
- View messages
- Clear messages
Other features include:
Demo Video
Manage Hosted Services
Windows Azure provides a Service Management API using which you can manage the applications hosted in
Windows Azure. We have implemented these APIs and provided an easy to use user interface to manage these
applications. By including this capability in Cloud Storage Studio, you don't have to go to Windows Azure
Portal to manage your applications. You can do it right from your desktop.
Here are the things that you can do as far as managing your hosted applications:
- You can manage one or more subscriptions and one or more hosted services in each of the subscriptions.
- You can create/update/delete/run your deployments.
- You can swap production and staging deployments.
- You can also promote a staging deployment (only when production deployment is not available).
- You can do both manual and automatic service upgrades.
- You can update the service configurations.
- You can manage SSL certificates associated with hosted services.
- You can view the affinity groups.
- You can view service properties.
To learn more about how to manage Hosted Services using Cloud Storage Studio, please read the following
blog entry:
http://www.cerebrata.com/Blog/post/Managing-Hosted-Services-Using-Cloud-Storage-Studio.aspx
Demo Video
Configurable
Cloud Storage Studio is completely configurable. You can completely customize how you want this application to
interact with your Azure storage. Few of the important configuration settings that are available to you are:
- Blob/Block Size Settings: Basically this setting lets you decide how do you want to
split your blobs into blocks while uploading/downloading them. So if you are uploading a blob which is of 1MB, you can tell the application
to split it into blocks of say 32 KB for a reliable and faster uploads.
- # Concurrent Blobs/Blocks: You can specify total number of blobs/blocks to be uploaded/
downloaded simultaneously.
- Max results / call: You can specify your result size. For example you can specify how many
entities you want to see in one call to the storage account.
- File Content Type settings: You can specify custom content types of the files you are uploading to Blob storage.
For example you can specify the content type of a Silverlight XAP file to be application/x-silverlight-app.
- Custom File Handlers to view Blobs: You may have a file in Blob storage for which you do not have
a registered handler for viewing/editing purpose on your computer or you may want to handle a particular blob through a different
handler than the registered handler for that blob type. In Cloud Storage Studio you can define the file type and the handler
application to handle that kind of file.
Demo Video
Utilities
We have included a Table data download utility in Cloud Storage Studio which will let you download data
stored in Azure Table Storage to your computer.
Cloud Storage Studio also includes a facility to upload data from relational databases (Microsoft SQL Server,
and MySQL) and from XML files to Azure Table Storage. Ability to import data from other sources (Amazon SimpleDB etc.)
will be provided later.
We have included a Request Inspector utility in Cloud Storage Studio. Think of it as
Fiddler application. It tracks your
requests & responses & shows you the data (request/response URL, headers, data etc.) in the application
itself.
We will be integrating more utilities in future.
Demo Video