Paper Notes: Windows Azure Storage – A Highly Available Cloud Storage Service with Strong Consistency
Windows Azure Storage(WAS) is a cloud-based storage system that supports durable storage of customer’s data. The underlying storage infrastructure provides support for storing data in form of tables, blob & queues. Typical usage of data abstractions provided by WAS is incoming/outgoing data in form of blob, queues being used for workflow between applications & persistent state being stored in tables or blobs.
WAS(at the time of this paper) is used inside Microsoft for various applications such as social-media search, game content etc. WAS provides strong consistency & even goes on to claim support for all three properties of CAP theorem. It provides a global namespace so that the data can be accessed from multiple geographical locations & with its multi-tenant architecture, it achieves all the functionalities with reduced cost. In this paper we will take a look at how WAS achieves durability amidst well-known failures associated with a distributed system.
Let us start by exploring WAS from a hawk-eye view. We will look into globally partitioned namespace that allows data stored under WAS from multiple locations & see the core components that form the high-level architecture of WAS.
