Azure Blobs Storage Driver Documentation
========================================

Connecting to Azure Blobs
-------------------------

To connect to Azure Blobs you need your storage account name and access key.

You can retrieve this information in the Azure Management Portal by going to
"Storage Accounts" -> "Access Keys" as shown on the screenshots below.

.. figure:: /_static/images/misc/azure_blobs_manage_access_keys_1.png
    :align: center
    :width: 900


.. figure:: /_static/images/misc/azure_blobs_manage_access_keys_2.png
    :align: center
    :width: 900

Note that libcloud only supports general purpose storage accounts so make sure
to select the "Storage (general purpose v1)" account kind when creating your
storage account as shown on the screenshot below.

.. figure:: /_static/images/misc/azure_blobs_account_kind.png
    :align: center
    :width: 900

Instantiating a driver
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Once you have obtained your credentials you can instantiate the driver as shown
below.

.. literalinclude:: /examples/storage/azure/instantiate.py
   :language: python

Connecting to self-hosted Azure Storage implementations
-------------------------------------------------------

To facilitate integration testing, libcloud supports connecting to the
`Azurite storage emulator`_. After starting the emulator, you can
instantiate the driver as shown below.

.. literalinclude:: /examples/storage/azure/instantiate_azurite.py
   :language: python

This instantiation strategy can also be adapted to connect to other self-hosted
Azure Storage implementations such as `Azure Blob Storage on IoT Edge`_.

.. _`Azurite storage emulator`: https://github.com/Azure/Azurite
.. _`Azure Blob Storage on IoT Edge`: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/iot-edge/how-to-store-data-blob