March 2nd, 2018

Azure Blob Storage as a Network Drive

Many applications make use of a network drive to backup and store files. When I was in university I found myself constantly coding for fun, and one example took the form of a network share for my roommates to share files wrapped in a handy little app.

Unfortunately, that particular app has long since been erased from whichever hard drive it was initially birthed. Fortunately, I think we can reinvent this magical piece of software (albeit to a scoped degree) with Azure Blob Storage. In the past, network drives did the trick, but Azure Storage offers users automatic backups, better flexibility and global availability, all at a very low cost (or no cost if you are using free Azure credits).

I took my partial memory of the general skeleton of the former masterpiece and rewrote it using Blobs as the backing file store. We are going to build this app as it was in its glory days, which means we need a few things.