
Show HN: AzureFS – I mounted Azure Cloud Storage as filesystem on Linux - aalpb
http://alpblog.heroku.com/blog/introducing-azurefs/
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anonymouz
Nice. But it seems some easy improvements are possible: Do you really need to
call get_blob(), downloading the entire blob, when a file is opened?

Similarly, in read() you always download the entire blob (again). It seems
that get_blob() comes with an x_ms_range parameter that would allow you to
specify the byte range you actually want.

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aalpb
That's a great point thank you. I will fix it.

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rssems
The problem with such remote storage APIs and fuse is that you should
sacrifice consistency or speed. I once tried out a s3 wrapper and it was
caching some data about fs and ended up being inconsistent.

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jlgreco
Do you know which side sshfs falls on? I'm guessing slow?

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aalpb
Yes it is.

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michaelkscott
I didn't really understand the use case for this until the last paragraph.
Might help others:

 _...imagine there’s a case where you would like to upload your daily log
files to the cloud with a cronjob, then you can mount AzureFS upon startup and
let your cronjob just copy the files to the cloud very easily._

Also loving the 'wp-svbtle' at the bottom...

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ArnoVanLumig
One of my recent weekend projects was implementing a simple command-line
interface to the Azure blob storage in Haskell. It's not quite finished, but
may still be useful to some. Check it out at
<https://github.com/ArnoVanLumig/azurify>

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aalpb
That's cool. Starred.

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modo_
Here's a weekend project with a similar goal, but aimed at Dropbox. Still
needs a bit of work though..

<https://github.com/Modoatk/DoITLive>

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thepumpkin1979
Very interesting. I wonder why did you choose Azure Storage over AWS S3.

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quotemstr
Azure is actually very fast, and S3 has historically been a bit less than
reliable.

(Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft, but not on Azure.)

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garblegarble
Could you provide some outages you're referring to for S3 reliability? I've
been using it for the last 4 years and not had a problem.

My experience is also backed up by Nasuni's Cloud Storage Benchmark from
December that report that AWS has 1.4 outages a month (compared to Azure's
11.1 a month) and concluded that AWS was faster than Azure (AWS & Azure being
the top performers)

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timrogers
Has anyone tested this for OS X compatibility?

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aalpb
I coded it and tested it a little bit. Not all features work and I don't
recommend you to use it. OSX issues kinda different filesystem calls that I
should have been handled but I didn't.

