Microsoft Azure Storage is a cloud offering from Microsoft that provides highly scalable, available, durable storage. Its a part of Microsoft Azure offerings. Azure Storage consists of three data services: Blob storage, File storage, and Queue storage. Blob storage supports both standard and premium storage, with premium storage using only SSDs for the fastest performance possible.
Now as is often the case with the cloud services, it comes at a cost. So you should be very careful in using only the space you need and not paying for extra storage consumption that you should not need to. Along with that, you should be able to automate it. In this blog post, we’ll learn how to create an Azure Storage account, uploads some files to it in the blob storage and then delete them all using PowerShell.
Login to Azure Resource Manager
For this, we’ll need to run cmdlet Login-AzureRMAccount. This will create a pop-up box where you can enter your credentials to authenticate. Once done, you may need to run cmdlet Set-AzureRMContext to set the azure context to the subscription under which you want to create azure storage account.
Create an Azure Resource Group
First, since everything is a resource in Azure Resource Model, we would need to have a resource group that could be used to hold our storage account. We can do that using below code:
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| # Creates an azure resource group | |
| $resourceGroupName = "mobiNotify-rg" | |
| $locationName = "east us" | |
| New-AzureRmResourceGroup –Name $resourceGroupName –Location $locationName |
This should throw an output like below:
Creates an Azure Storage Account
Microsoft provides various types of storage for same and you need to be a little bit familiar with kind of options that you would need to use. You can read about it here. We can use below code to create a general purpose storage account for us:
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| # Create General Purpose Azure Storage Account | |
| $strAccountName = "mobinotifysa" | |
| $locationName = "east us" | |
| $sku = "Standard_LRS" | |
| New-AzureRmStorageAccount –ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName –AccountName $strAccountName –SkuName $sku –Location $locationNam |
On success, this should give a response like below:
Create Azure Blob Storage Container(s)
First we need to identify connection information for the storage account. For this we need to use either storage account key or the endpoint. This information can be found from storage account in the Portal itself:
We would need to set azure storage context using above key using below commands:
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| # Creates Azure Blob Storage Container | |
| $strAccountKey = "yztbMxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" # Replace this with your storage key | |
| $strContext = New-AzureStorageContext –StorageAccountName $strAccountName –StorageAccountKey $strAccountKey | |
| $containerName = "testfiles" | |
| New-AzureStorageContainer –Name $containerName –Context $strcontext |
Upload files to Blob Storage Container
For this demo, I would like to upload everything that’s stored under directory C:\Source\ConsoleApp01 on my local machine. It contains few hidden files, few files and sub-directories with files:
We can choose to upload files with preservation of hierarchy structure or not. To do that, we can use below command:
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| # Uploads file to Azure Container without preserving file hierarchy | |
| $localDir = "C:\Source\ConsoleApp01" | |
| foreach($file in (Get-ChildItem $localDir –File –Recurse)){ | |
| Set-AzureStorageBlobContent –Blob $($file.Name) –Container $containerName –File $($file.FullName) –Context $strcontext | |
| } | |
| # Uploads file to Azure Container with preserving file hierarchy | |
| $localDir = "C:\Source\ConsoleApp01" | |
| foreach($file in (Get-ChildItem $localDir –File –Recurse)){ | |
| $blobName = $file.FullName.Remove(0,23).Replace("\","/") | |
| Set-AzureStorageBlobContent –Blob $blobName –Container $containerName –File $($file.FullName) –Context $strcontext | |
| } |
The magic number 23 in remove() function is the number of characters we need to remove from full name of the file. This would change depending upon your file path.
Below is the output for both:
And with second option to preserve hierarchy:
File Deletion from Blob Storage Container
More often that note, we would need to remove file based on a certain criteria. Like based on a path structure or timestamp etc. For purpose of this demo, we would like to delete everything older than 1 minute (Since we just uploaded files to azure). You can change the filters as per your needs.
First, we can get blob list using below command:
Get-AzureStorageBlob -Container $containerName -Context $strContext
Then we can filter it based on timestamp, say older than 1 minute:
Get-AzureStorageBlob -Container $containerName -Context $strContext | Where-Object {$_.LastModified -le ($(Get-Date).AddMinutes(-1))}
And finally, removing the content:
Remove-AzureStorageBlob -Blob $($blob.Name) -Container $containerName -Context $strContext
So our command would look like:
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| # Deletes files from Azure Blob Storage | |
| $blobList = Get-AzureStorageBlob –Container $containerName –Context $strContext | Where-Object {$_.LastModified -le ($(Get-Date).AddMinutes(-1))} | |
| foreach($blob in $blobList){ | |
| Write-Host "Removing blob $($blob.Name)" | |
| Remove-AzureStorageBlob –Blob $($blob.Name) –Container $containerName –Context $strContext | |
| } |
We have also added a Write-Host command for purpose of auditing.
Once deleted, we can verify the change from Azure Portal too:
mohitgoyal.co 
[…] In one of the previous posts, we discussed how to create and manage Azure Storage accounts using PowerShell. However, we were using storage account key when trying to upload / delete / download files from azure blob storage. In case, you need to delegate access to a third person, this seems like a too much of access since that person will have access to whole storage account. In this post, we will discuss how to use SAS aka Shared Access Signature to delegate access in controlled way. […]
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