Being on the lookout for tools that will enhance the Azure development and support experience I was pleased to be asked to participate in the private beta of the Cerebrata Software Cloud Storage Studio (CSCSS)
The current beta is now public (V 5.0) and can be downloaded from http://www.cerebrata.com/
I haven’t really had much time to look at the previous betas but with a version that has support for development storage I made the time and thought I’d share my initial thoughts about it.
I’m assuming if you’ve got this far you have either read some of my previous posts on Azure storage or at least have some familiarity with Azure as the focus of this blog is to assess at a fairly high level how useful CSCSS really would be in the sort of Azure development scenarios I could expect to be working with rather than focusing on Azure features as such or the detail of the features that the Cerebrata guys have incorporated into their tool.
Connecting to Azure storage via CSCSS is easy enough and best of all a consistent interface to both the development storage and Azure storage
You can save your connections which saves logging onto the Azure portal to grab the primary access key (Well I can’t remember mine).
The real cool thing though is being able to simultaneously connect to the development fabric and Azure storage and work on them using the same interface
Once connected it’s intuitive to use via the tree menus providing a nice easy to use interface to allow you to manage Azure storage or the local development storage.
As you drill down the actions available for that entity are available e.g right clicking at the table level you get the option to create tables and refresh , when you select an actual table and right click on that you get the options you expect against an Azure table namely: Open/view entities, Table Designer, Query table, Delete table and New Table. Similar tree menus are available at the container level.
Query Table storage uses LINQ and if like me its something you haven’t really got into there is some handy context sensitive help from within CSCSS
I’ve been keeping an eye on what the cerebreta guys have been up to since March and you can see how the interface has evolved and more features have been added .
As long as your container isn’t marked as private its simple to access the actual blobs by right clicking to pull up the menu selecting show Blob URL and then clicking launch. You can generate signed URls for private containers as well all via the interface Downloading blobs from your storage is just as easy and if you want you can tweak the download settings using the Blob download settings.
I wanted to test moving blobs around containers so created another container. It was nice to see that you could easily set the container access policy via a fairly comprehensive screen. I would normally advocate scripting this sort of configuration data and putting into TFS but to easily set this up graphically initially is very handy. Being able to export the container policy via CSCSS would be a nice to have feature.
Moving blobs from one container to another within the same account is easily accomplished ( moving multiple blobs around is easy enough) but I found I had to log out and back in again to actually see the blob in its new container although the source container is refreshed immediately . The refresh didn’t work . A minor problem though .
When you have a Dev/Stage/UAT/Production configuration which may be in different accounts type moving blobs between those easily would be a nice to have.
The CSCSS is a nicely put together and intuitive to use ( I dislike the one click installation for numerous reasons but I’ve been told this is just for the beta) . It provides a single interface to ‘manage’ Azure storage locally or in the cloud . As a tool to assist in the sorts of scenarios I anticipate as the potential of Azure solutions are explored by larger development teams its definitely on the yes please list . There are some simpler tools that are useful as well though. One I’ve mentioned before in an earlier blog and it’s still part of my toolset Azure Storage Explorer but unlike CSCSS it’s less feature rich but it does what it says on the tin although it’s no where near as stable as CSCSS.
So if all you’re after is a tool to just do simple CRUD actions then Azure Storage Explorer is probably good enough but if you need a more sophisticated tool that goes beyond that then I’d recommend looking at CSCSS its evolving and plenty more features are being promised and it does provide a nice way to provide management of Azure Cloud storage .