I have a Azure cloud service which needs to access (read) thousands of small binary files and perform some computations with those. The key requirement here is speed - it needs to be as fast as possible. I tried using Azure blob storage for keeping these file but access was too slow, so currently I am keeping these files in the Azure cloud service local storage itself. This is not ideal as we are not supposed to store state in the VM -- persistence is not guaranteed and it is not shareable across VM instances.
I read about Azure premium storage (SSD drives which can be attached to VMs). This looked ideal in theory but I cannot see a way to add this to a cloud service.
So, my questions are:
adding disks can be done to azure computer VMs and not cloud services. In this case you can use Azure file storage service which offers storage similar to network share. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/storage-dotnet-how-to-use-files/