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

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

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

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