How to replicate Azure Blobs

In today post we will talk about how we can replicate content in multiple storage accounts of Azure.
If you remember the last post that I had, this one is related to it and describes the replication process.
First of all
Why we need to do something like this?
There are cases when we have a system that is distributed on multiple data centers and we want to be able to have the specific content in all locations around the globe. We don’t want a user from China to requests binary content from Europe if the system is deployed in China also. We could use CDNs but CDNs don’t have support for Shared Access Signature (SAS)
Beside this, if we have a lot of clients that will requests the same blob content than we will have a problem. A blob can handle maximum 500 requests and the bandwidth that is available per blob is around 60MB. This mean that if we have 100 clients, that wants to download the content with 1MB each than... will have a small problem.
When we talk about replication don’t imagine that replication needs to be done on different datacenters. The content can be replicated in the same datacenters on different blobs under the same storage account or using different storage accounts.
Below, we can see a diagram that present a replication schema that is:

• On two storage accounts in the main datacenters
• On four other datacenters (one storage account per data centers)

The secret around replication action is ‘StartCopyFromBlobAsync’. This method allow us to trigger a copy action from a blob to another blob. In this way we can easily copy all the content of a blob (including properties, metadata and payload) to another blob without having manually to manage each step.
Once the action is triggered, you will need to check the async operation status and make sure that the copy action finished with success.
await destinationBlob.StartCopyFromBlobAsync(new Uri(sourceBlobUri));

• The status that is returned by can be:
• CopyStatus.Aborded – the copy action was aborted
• CopyStatus.Failed – an error occurred
• CopyStatus.Pending – copy is still in progress
• CopyStatus.Success – copy was finished

We don’t have any control at how long the copy action will take. Because of this we need to wait the action to finish and check the status code. As input uri, we can even use a secure blob storage that has a SAS token.

public class BlobReplication
    {       
        public async Task ReplicateBlobAsync(string blobSasUri, CancellationToken cancellationToken = default(CancellationToken))
        {
            List<ICloudBlob> destBlobs = new List<ICloudBlob>();

            try
            {
                var sasUri = new Uri(blobSasUri);

                var blobClient = new CloudBlobClient(sasUri);

                ICloudBlob sourceBlob = blobClient.GetBlobReferenceFromServer(sasUri);

                var startCopyTasks = new List<Task<ICloudBlob>>();

                foreach (var destConnectionString in configuration.ReplicationStorageAccounts.Select(c => c.ConnectionString))
                {                    
                    var destStorageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(destConnectionString);                    
                    if (destStorageAccount.BlobEndpoint.ToString() != storageAccount.BlobEndpoint.ToString())
                    {
                        var task = StartReplicationAsync(sourceBlob, blobSasUri, destStorageAccount, cancellationToken);
                        startCopyTasks.Add(task);
                    }
                }

                await Task.WhenAll(startCopyTasks);
                destBlobs = startCopyTasks.Select(t => t.Result).ToList();
                
        await WaitForBlobCopy(destBlobs, cancellationToken);
            }
            catch (OperationCanceledException)
            {                
                foreach (var dest in destBlobs)
                {
                    try
                    {
                        var destBlob = dest.Container.GetBlobReferenceFromServer(dest.Name);

                        if (destBlob.CopyState.Status == CopyStatus.Pending)
                        {
                            destBlob.AbortCopy(destBlob.CopyState.CopyId);
                        }

                    }
                    catch (Exception)
                    {
            ...
                    }
                }
                throw;
            }
        }

        private async Task<ICloudBlob> StartReplicationAsync(ICloudBlob sourceBlob, string sourceBlobSasUri, CloudStorageAccount destStorageAccount,
            CancellationToken cancellationToken = default (CancellationToken))
        {
            string containerName = sourceBlob.Container.Name;

            CloudBlobContainer destContainer = await destStorageAccount.GetBlobContainerAsync(containerName);

            ICloudBlob destBlob;    
            if (sourceBlob.Properties.BlobType == BlobType.BlockBlob)
            {
                destBlob = destContainer.GetBlockBlobReference(sourceBlob.Name);
            }
            else
            {
                destBlob = destContainer.GetPageBlobReference(sourceBlob.Name);
            }

            await destBlob.StartCopyFromBlobAsync(new Uri(sourceBlobSasUri), cancellationToken);

            return destBlob;
        }

        private async Task WaitForBlobCopy(List<ICloudBlob> blobs, CancellationToken cancellationToken = default(CancellationToken))
        {
            Dictionary<string, int> failedAttempts = blobs.ToDictionary(k => k.Uri.ToString(), v => 0);
            bool pendingCopy = true;

            while (pendingCopy)
            {
                cancellationToken.ThrowIfCancellationRequested();

                pendingCopy = false;

                foreach (var dest in blobs)
                {
                    pendingCopy |= await IsCopyInProgress(dest, failedAttempts, cancellationToken);
                }

                if (pendingCopy)
                {
                    await Task.Delay(configuration.ReplicationStatusPollingInterval, cancellationToken);
                }
            }
        }

        private async Task<bool> IsCopyInProgress(ICloudBlob dest, IDictionary<string, int> failedAttempts, CancellationToken cancellationToken = default(CancellationToken))
        {
            bool pendingCopy = false;
            var destBlob = await dest.Container.GetBlobReferenceFromServerAsync(dest.Name, cancellationToken);

            switch (destBlob.CopyState.Status)
            {
                case CopyStatus.Aborted:
                case CopyStatus.Failed:

                    int numberOfFailes;
                    if (failedAttempts.TryGetValue(destBlob.Uri.ToString(), out numberOfFailes) &&
                        numberOfFailes < configuration.MaximumReplicationRetries)
                    {
                        pendingCopy = true;

                        await destBlob.StartCopyFromBlobAsync(destBlob.CopyState.Source, cancellationToken);
                        failedAttempts[destBlob.Uri.ToString()] = numberOfFailes + 1;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        throw new Exception("Failed to replicate blob " + destBlob.Name);
                    }
                    break;
                case CopyStatus.Pending:
                    pendingCopy = true;
                    break;
                case CopyStatus.Success:
                    pendingCopy = false;
                    break;
                default:
                    throw new Exception("Undefined copy state");
            }

            return pendingCopy;
        }      
    }

In the above sample code we can see how to replicate the content to multiple location and how to ensure that copy action had finished with success. There is only one case that is not take into account: What happens if the process ends before replication action ends. How we can check that the replication was done with success?
This topic will be discussed tomorrow.
Enjoy!