In this post I’m explaining how to switch the blob storage provider to make use of Azure Blob Storage. Before Sitecore 9.3, we could store the blobs on the DB or filesystem, Azure Blob Storage was not supported out of the box and even tough it was possible, it required some customizations to make it working, nowadays, since Sitecore 9.3 a module has been released and is very straightforward to setup, as you will see in this post.

By doing this we can significantly reduce costs and improve performance as the DB size won’t increase that much due to the media library items.

Introduction to Azure Blob storage

Azure Blob storage is Microsoft’s object storage solution for the cloud. Blob storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data. Unstructured data is data that doesn’t adhere to a particular data model or definition, such as text or binary data.

Blob storage is designed for:

• Serving images or documents directly to a browser.
• Storing files for distributed access.
• Streaming video and audio.
• Writing to log files.
• Storing data for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and archiving.
• Storing data for analysis by an on-premises or Azure-hosted service.

Users or client applications can access objects in Blob storage via HTTP/HTTPS, from anywhere in the world. Objects in Blob storage are accessible via the Azure Storage REST API, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, or an Azure Storage client library.

For more info please refer here and also you can find some good documentation here.

Creating your blob storage resource

Create the resource by following the wizard and then check the “Access Keys” section, you’ll need the “Connection string” later.

Configuring your Sitecore instance

There are basically three main option to install the blob storage module into your instance:

1. Install the Azure Blob Storage module in Sitecore PaaS.
   1. Use the Sitecore Azure Toolkit:
      1. Use a new Sitecore installation with Sitecore Azure Toolkit
      2. Use an existing Sitecore installation with Sitecore Azure Toolkit
   2. Use Sitecore in the Azure Marketplace (for new Sitecore installations only)
2. Install the Azure Blob Storage module on an on-premise Sitecore instance.
3. Manually install the Azure Blob Storage module in PaaS or on-premise.

This time I’ll be focusing in the last option, manually installing the module, doesn’t matter if it’s a PaaS or on-premise approach.

Manual installations steps

1. Download the Azure Blob Storage module WDP from the Sitecore Downloads page.
2. Extract (unzip) the WDP.
3. Copy the contents of the bin folder of the WDP into the Sitecore web application bin folder.
4. Copy the contents of the App_Config folder of the WDP into the Sitecore web application App_Config folder.
5. Copy the contents of the App_Data folder of the WDP into the Sitecore web application App_Data folder.
6. Add the following connection string to the App_Config\ConnectionStrings.config file of the Sitecore web application.

 <add name="azureblob" connectionString="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=myblobtestazure;AccountKey={KEY};EndpointSuffix=core.windows.net"/>

7. In the \App_Config\Modules\Sitecore.AzureBlobStorage\Sitecore.AzureBlobStorage.config file, ensure that <param name="blobcontainer"> is the name you gave to the container after creating the resource.

Let’s test it!

If everything went well, then we can just test it by uploading a media item to the Sitecore media library

Let’s have a look now at the Storage Explorer in the Azure portal

Here we go, the image is now uploaded into the Azure blob storage, meaning the config is fine and working as expected.