Kerkia

Background

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud technology. Its architecture is different from other cloud technologies and has been designed specifically for the purpose of optimizing cloud applications. Data in there is stored in either blobs (kind of files), tables (kind of data tables) or queues (kind of messages). The Xdrive (kind of a file system) and SQL Server options are also possible but not considered here. To view and edit all that data, one can use the web interface. But this is a bit cumbersome hence the need to a more dedicated utility.

Recommendations

We actually found only on such application, called Azure Storage Explorer. This is an open source project in CodePlex, and is in beta version. It works pretty well however. You can not only browse your data but also create or remove containers and items of all types. Even more useful you can import/export data from/to your own file system; it then uses the csv format for tables.

Web links

Azure Storage Explorer

Web site: http://azurestorageexplorer.codeplex.com/

Download: http://azurestorageexplorer.codeplex.com/