When utilizing Azure Blob storage with our products (AttachmentExtractor or DocumentsCorePack), customers will need to set up and configure it. This article aims to assist customers by providing a comprehensive list of our general recommendations for using Azure Blob storage effectively.
Access Tier
There are a few tiers that can be selected: Hot, cool, cold, and archive. These tiers differ in their optimization for storing data. The tier that should be selected is dependent entirely on your own access needs. Thus, it is recommended that internal evaluations should be done to determine the optimal tier for your needs. From our own observations, usually, the cold tier is fine, but most customers choose hot.
Note: The archive must not be used usable due to slow access latency (1+ hours).
Public Access Level
The access level should be set to allow for public, but non-anonymous access. Accessing the Blob storage should require a SAS(Shared-Access-Signature) token and must be reachable from the outside.
Blob Public Access
Our recommendation is that this setting is disabled. This would give public access to the Azure Blob storage without a SAS-key, which is not recommended. Keep in mind, that with this setting enabled your data is publicly available.
Hierarchical Namespace
Our recommendation is that this setting is disabled because the utilization of Azure Blob by our solutions does not require a hierarchy.
Replication/Redundancy
An internal evaluation should be done to determine the appropriate level of redundancy for your business needs and backup policies. For using Azure Blob storage with our products, this is not relevant.
Account Kind
Both StorageV1 and StorageV2 are fine.
Performance
Our recommendation is that performance should be set to standard.
Do not use IP filtering
IP filtering can NOT be used. The reason for this is that including IP filtering for an Azure Blob Storage located in the same data center your Dynamics 365 instances are hosted in can lead to complications when used with our products.
Generate SAS – Stored access policy
For generating an SAS key, we recommend setting the stored access policy to none.
That’s it! We appreciate your feedback! Please share your thoughts by sending an email to support@mscrm-addons.com.