Azure Files – let’s share a file
If you often find yourself copying files between servers and losing precious time on this tedious task or if you are thinking to supplement your files server, Azure Files is something you should definitely look into. During projects, it’s not unusual for us to copy files to servers or to workstations with some scripts or software packages. Sometimes it can be as much as few gigabytes of data. When Azure Files first appeared on the market, we decided to give it a try and quickly it became our “cloud USB stick”.
Benefits of Azure files
Fast and easy configuration and connection to your host (Windows, Linux, MacOS)
Managed by Azure. You don’t need to think about the disks. You only need to create a quota on share – that’s all.
Easy mount and unmount of the disk as a share when you need a place to store some logs or other data gathered during the script processing
It’s always available for you because it’s resilient service
How to create?
As stated above, creating and using Azure File is easy. You can use Azure portal to do this or if you prefer PowerShell, you can use it as well.
Connect to your share
Linking to your Azure File share is as easy as creating one. In Azure portal there’s a Connect button and once you click it, you will get instructions on how to connect to your file share.
As you can see, you have three options: cmd, PowerShell and Linux shell. Choose the best option for you and then just use it.
What’s next?
Our clients often come to us asking to replace their on-prem file servers with Azure Files because is they are so easy to configure and use. Unfortunately, Azure Files it’s not the same service as server files. Microsoft is still working on easy manage permissions in the Azure File.
As soon as it comes out we will write about it and show you how it works, so keep an eye out for our future blog posts.
When you decide to use Azure Files for synchronization files between your on-prem environment and cloud, the next post should definitely interest you.