This is the process of getting some data out of the local environment and up to the cloud – actually this is what evaporation is – the moisture has to come from somewhere whether its my backyard or the Gulf of Mexico and get up into the atmosphere and form the cloud to make the rain, right?

Like I mentioned, in the previous post I have been using mock data to get some of the view plumbing working so now I need to actually being taking things off my Azure Service Bus queue and putting them somewhere else.  I didn’t think about this b/c I just wanted to let the app’s development process lead me to the next feasible (and cheapest) choice for storage and persistence.  And the thought in the back of my mind is something that Ayenda Rahein said in a keynote a few years ago… “we should be optimizing for persisting data, not retrieving it.”  Yeah, pretty big statement, but it’s true.

So, the simplest thing I could do would be to persist everything into Azure table or blob storage until there’s some requirement for reporting then maybe a database can come into play.  I have to pay extra storage and compute costs on my Azure account to host a database and I don’t really need a full blown database instance right now.  I can just figure out what I need by stuffing things into something flatter and cheaper.  But, if I code this right, I should be able to move it into an instance if something triggers that need.

Moving on.

I settled on blob storage for my logging and table storage for my application data.  I built my code from this post which had some quick and dirty examples about accessing Azure’s table storage.  It turned out nice so hopefully it can be extended for other table storage persistence needs in the future.  Not as generic as I would have liked it, but it works for now.

Now, the app is throwing something somewhere b/c the local worker role is puking and coughing pretty hard right now.  So, back to my earlier post from yesterday, even though my tests are passing I need something to catch this junk so I look at it.  This will allow me to wire up the blob storage client – oh, there’s the PowerShell stuff to get to as well.  Should be a full(er) day today.

HTH / 0Fc