Question

I’d really appreciate if someone could point me in the right direction.

I’m trying to build an Azure-based website. I’m already using Blob storage to store a large number of photographs. What is the best way to store settings relating to the global configuration of the site?

For example, through the Administration interface some settings need to be able to be changed, such as ‘FooterCopyrightText’ or ‘Countries’ (with a list of area codes, etc.). I don’t want to build these in to Web.Config, or include it as a data file in App_Data.

If this was a local desktop application I could simply have it deserialize an XML file and store it in memory as a static variable, but this approach doesn’t work for a scalable application on Azure.

My thought is to do something like store it in Azure Blob storage, and cache the settings.

Is this the right approach?

Thank you for any ideas or pointers.

Answer 1

We had a similar issue on my recent project where we needed to store the HTML associated with various emails that we send out. We ended up storing the text in Azure Table Storage which provides a cheap and fast way to store information like this that is globally accessible across several roles and websites.

Here is a walkthrough to get you started.