DEV Community

Craig Nicol (he/him)
Craig Nicol (he/him)

Posted on • Originally published at craignicol.wordpress.com on

3 1

Cloud thinking : storage as data structures

We’ve all experienced the performance implications of saving files. We use buffers, and we use them asynchronously.

Azure storage has Blobs. They look like files, and they fail like files if you write a line at a time rather than buffering. But they’re not files, they’re data structures, and you need to understand them as you need to understand O(N) when looking at Arrays and Linked Lists. Are you optimising for inserts, appends or reads, or cost?

I know it’s tempting to ignore the performance and just blame “the network” but you own your dependencies and you can do better. Understand your tools, and embrace data structures as persistent storage. After all, in the new serverless world, that’s all you’ve got.


Understanding Block Blobs, Append Blobs, and Page Blobs | Microsoft Docs

AWS Q Developer image

Your AI Code Assistant

Generate and update README files, create data-flow diagrams, and keep your project fully documented. Built to handle large projects, Amazon Q Developer works alongside you from idea to production code.

Get started free in your IDE

Top comments (0)

Billboard image

The Next Generation Developer Platform

Coherence is the first Platform-as-a-Service you can control. Unlike "black-box" platforms that are opinionated about the infra you can deploy, Coherence is powered by CNC, the open-source IaC framework, which offers limitless customization.

Learn more

👋 Kindness is contagious

Please leave a ❤️ or a friendly comment on this post if you found it helpful!

Okay