Object Replication for Block Blobs Overview

What is object replication for block blobs?

According to the official Microsoft documentation, object replication asynchronously copies block blobs between a source storage account and a destination account.

Some use cases where we can use object replication are:

• Minimizing latency
• Increase efficiency for compute workloads
• Optimizing data distribution
• Optimizing costs

For more detailed information about how object replication works, I suggest you read the official documentation from Microsoft I mentioned previously.

Configuring object replication

For this example, I have already created a storage account named 'ilievimages' (source) with North Europe as the region and 'ilievimagesreplicated' (destination) with Italy North as the region.

In order for the replication to work, we need to configure the following:

• Enable change feed on the source account
• Enable blob versioning on both source and destination accounts

Let's take a look at the contents of the storage account we will replicate. In my case, I have the following data inside:

The contents of the destination storage account are the following:

Next, we will configure object replication from the 'ilievimages' to the 'ilievimagesreplicated' storage account.

Open the source storage account that you want to configure the replication for. Under 'Data management' select 'Object replication'.

Click on the '+ Create replication rules' button.

For our replication rule, we configure the 'backgrounds' container as the source and the 'backgroundsreplicated' as the destination container. We can optionally add one or more filters to copy only blobs that match a prefix pattern. For the 'Copy over' option, select 'Everything'.

Finish by successfully creating the replication rule.

If we check the 'Object replication' on our destination storage account, we can observe the 'Objects copied into this account' is also set.

Checking the object replication

We can check the object replication by opening the properties of a source blob. In the current example, we can open the properties of 'blue-water-and-white-cliffs-surrounded-by-trees.jpg' blob and observe that the Policy ID and Rule ID are present, and that the Status is 'Complete'.

And finally, if we check our destination container, we can see that we have the same contents replicated to it.

Next steps:

• Using Entity Framework Core with Azure Cosmos Database
• Perform Common Data Operations Using Azure Storage Actions
• Azure virtual network management made easy - using Azure Virtual Network Manager