Storage Accounts
Cloud Storage Studio 2 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 2 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.
Manage Subscriptions
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 2, 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 hosted services, storage accounts, affinity groups.
- 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.
- You can view Azure data center locations.
- You can view available operating system families available in Windows Azure.
- You can reboot role instances.
- You can reimage role instances.
- You can connect to your role instances via remote desktop connection using Cloud
Storage Studio 2.
- You can easily scale up/down your role instances with just one click of a button
instead of manually editing the application configuration file.
Connection Groups
A number of users of Cloud Storage Studio wanted an easy way to group their storage
accounts and subscriptions for easier management. For example, they wanted to see their
test storage accounts and subscriptions separately from their production storage accounts.
In Cloud Storage Studio 2 we have introduced a concept of "Connection Groups" so that you
can logically group your storage accounts and subscriptions into different buckets. There is
no limit on the number of connection groups which you can create in this application.
Application Groups
Application groups extends the concept of Connection group by logically grouping one or more
hosted services (applications) and one or more storage accounts (presumably related to the
applications). Using an application group would allow you to manage your applications more
easily as you get to focus only on the items required for managing that particular application.
Storage Analytics
Cloud Storage Studio 2 allows you to configure your storage account to capture storage analytics
data using which you can find out the storage account usage at a granular level. It also offers you
the capability to view the raw data as well as it has some pre-canned reports to view the storage
analytics data in graphical format. You can download this reports data in CSV format for further analysis
as well as the capability to export the charts.
Permissions
In order to access a storage account you would need account name and account key which invariably
gives you administrative privileges on your storage account. Similarly when you connect to a
subscription using Subscription Id and the management certificate, you would get full access on that
particular subscription. The problem with this approach is that you may accidently delete or modify the
data and the application will not stop you. In Cloud Storage Studio 2, we have incorporated an application
level permission model using which you as a user can configure the permissions on operations which can be
performed by this application. For example, on your production storage accounts you can disable delete and update
permissions while on your test storage account you can disable just delete permissions. Further permissions can be
set separately for individual operations. For example, you could enable delete permission on queues but disable the
delete permission on blob containers.
Please note that this permission feature is specific to this application only and is not enforced by Windows Azure. You
would be able to make all kinds of changes if you use any other application to manage Windows Azure.
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 2, you can:
- Create tables
- Delete tables
- List tables
- Create entities
- List entities
- Edit/update entities
- Delete entities
Other features include:
- Query tables
- Download Table Data in XML Format
- Upload Data From Microsoft SQL Server/MySQL Databases, XML
- Advanced Filtering Capabilities
Manage Containers & Blobs
Windows Azure Blob enables applications to store large objects, up to 1TB each
in the cloud. Following are the features available in Cloud Storage Studio 2 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 2 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 2, 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.
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 2, you can:
- Create queues
- Delete queues
- List queues
- Edit queue metadata
- Create messages
- List messages
- View messages
- Clear messages
- Update messages
- Move messages
- Delete messages
Configurable
Cloud Storage Studio 2 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 2 you can define the
file type and the handler application to handle that kind of file.
Utilities
We have included a Table data download utility in Cloud Storage Studio 2 which
will let you download data stored in Azure Table Storage to your computer.
Cloud Storage Studio 2 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 will be integrating more utilities in future.