Integration with Azure blob storage

[shyamal890]

Will NextCloud support Azure blob storage as external storage in near future?

[MariusBluem]

Hm ... Let's put this as an enhancement. However - I do not see this in the near future 😁 ... Maybe you want to step in - or know somebody who wants so 😅

We have some external storage backends in Nextcloud, (Amazon) S3 seems to be finished for (primary) storage for Nextcloud 11: #768

This may be an alternative ... Sharepoint is also on the roadmap for 11, if you rely on Microsoft 😁

cc @icewind1991 @blizzz

[pascalsimi]

I find it rather puzzling that blob is not supported.
If you look at the gartner quadrant then there is Amazon and Microsoft as the big players.
Supporting only one of them cuts down potential user base by approximately 50%. Take into account how many personal computers actually run on Microsoft it's even more puzzling to me why Microsoft blob is not on the roadmap. But hey its just my thoughts. Thanks for all the hard work you put into next cloud. All you guys are awesome!

[gjonespf]

Would love to see this also. May be worth mentioning that (and I haven't tested this) but Azure File Store allows SMB access, so you could potentially run Nextcloud on an Azure VM with external storage mapped to the Azure File Store, as long as the VM and storage were in the same region (otherwise you need SMB3 encryption support, which isn't there yet in Linux). Something I will have to investigate.

[pascalsimi]

I have a few projects with Microsoft azure for processing and nextcloud for storage and sync right now and with their new push for openness on azure I think there is a good chance their evangelists might be interested in helping to implement that feature.
I'll mention it in the next meeting.

[pilcherd]

Support for Azure Blob would be good. Interesting about Azure File Store and SMB. Will look into that.

[MariusBluem]

https://github.com/icewind1991/files_external_azure

Digging for old code 😜😜 What was the state there @icewind1991 🤔🙈

[icewind1991]

Not working atm, will see if I can fix it when I get some time

[strategywise]

We're also interested in this ability. If the SMB mapping on the host box works would it in theory at least be able to read/write to the blob? If I have to get a blob mounted on the VM and it works well I don't think that would be a very hard work around for the time being.

[SpiraMirabilis]

I've been tinkering with this, using the S3 backend as a template. It's a bit of a work in progress. However, as a temporary measure you can use a Windows server (2008 or greater), with WebDAV authoring role for IIS and essentially act a proxy in between your users and azure blob storage, see this how-to: http://fabriccontroller.net/mounting-your-azure-file-shares-on-premises-through-webdav/ Edit: Actually, it looks like that only supports the Azure Files which is much more expensive than blob.

Should it support serving from the verizon/akamai CDN if it is linked to that storage account?

Also, either nextcloud will need dedicated access to the blob container, or maybe we can use a Service Bus subscription and just mandate that anyone adding/changing/removing a file triggers a message sent, that way we can confidently cache the metadata/contents and there wouldnt be polling which increases cost a lot.

[MorrisJobke]

This should be definitely be implemented as an app - see the files_external_dropbox external storage for example: https://github.com/icewind1991/files_external_dropbox