Is Windows Azure Storage (Blob, Table, Queue) optimized for access from Windows Azure roles?

Question

I am currently looking at Windows Azure to host ElasticSearch . Downloading the application and launching it under Java is not so difficult.

ElasticSearch currently only supports Amazon S3 when it comes to cloud storage.

As a result, I made a request to add support for Azure Blob Storage to ElasticSearch .

Immediately after I made the request, it seemed to me that although I can host ElasticSearch on Azure, I can create an Amazon S3 account and then start the instance in Azure, connect to the S3 account for storage.

However, I have concerns about the speed between them. Although I’m sure that both Azure Storage and Amazon S3 are optimized for really fast speeds, I feel that storage systems are really optimized when accessing their respective computing clusters.

However, is there any definitive information about this? It makes sense, but I'm looking for concrete evidence or denial.

Answer 1

This is not so much an optimization of the Azure Storage API for Azure Roles, but just a physical co-location and network distance / number of flights. You can (and should) specify that your Azure storage service is in the same data center as the Azure roles that will use this storage service.

You can expect that network bandwidth will be the highest and latency will be the lowest between the Azure role and the Azure storage located in the same data center. Bandwidth will be lower and latency higher if your Azure role connects to anything outside of its own data center — be it Azure storage in another data center or Amazon S3 storage in another data center.

In addition to performance, also keep in mind that you pay for all data traffic to and from the Azure data center for your services. Having the Azure role in accessing data on Amazon S3 or in another Azure data center will result in a bite out of your bandwidth quota, while accessing the Azure storage in one data center will not cost you no matter how much traffic you use between your role and your Azure vault.