Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform provides interoperable cloud computing services that are comprised of both open source and standards-based technologies. Case in point: Azure Files are managed file shares that you can access using the SMB (Server Message Block) protocol. The SMB protocol is used to provide shared access to resources like files, printers, and serial ports over a network. This article examines how we can work with Azure Files using .Net.
The Azure Storage services include shares, directories, and files. A share may be defined as a logical representation of drives that can be mapped. A share comprises of one or more directories. Each directory comprises of one or more files. This relationship is depicted in Figure 1.
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Figure 1: Shares, directories, and files in an Azure Storage account.
Getting started with Azure Storage
To work with files, queues, tables, and disks in Azure, you should have an Azure storage account. Essentially, an Azure Storage account is a unique namespace in the Azure cloud that can be used for storage and retrieval of data.
