Free FTP gateway to Azure storage. Anyone interested?

Question

Hello everyone!

Full disclosure: I'm the author of FTP to S3 gateway http://www.maluke.com/gate 

I've recently started a free service to provide FTP access to Amazon S3 storage and will probably extend it to support WebDav and other protocols like SFTP. I'm also considering supporting access to Azure storage, but before I spend any time on it, I was wondering if anyone here would care to use a service like that?

I know there are a couple do-it-yourself projects of similar nature, but they all seemed fragile and are to be self-hosted anyway.

So the question is if there's any interest in a free FTP to Azure or WebDav to Azure gateway?

I sincerely hope this question is appropriate here and if not, please accept my apologies.

Thanks,
-Sergey

Answer 1

If you build it, they will come.  This looks very useful.

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Auto-scaling & monitoring service for Windows Azure applications at http://www.paraleap.com

Answer 2

Hi Sergey,

I think a WebDav to Azure might be the most interesting. This will allow to open files directly in their application without having to 'download' them. We already see this behavior in SharePoint: thanks to WebDav to SQL users can open Word files, edit them, save them and the change is immediately applied in SharePoint.

For the FTP part I think there are a few implementations already:

• http://ftp2azure.codeplex.com/
• http://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2010/03/15/Using-FTP-to-access-Windows-Azure-Blob-Storage.aspx

Sandrino

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Sandrino Di Mattia | Twitter: http://twitter.com/sandrinodm | Azure Blog: http://fabriccontroller.net/blog | Blog: http://sandrinodimattia.net/blog

Answer 3

WebDav support in Windows makes a lot of unnecessary requests (locking in particular) making it look slow even with a very fast gateway, with a bit of lag between the client and the server it would get really painful. I'm looking for ways to work around that, but it's not trivial.

I've had a look at the solutions you've linked previously and the second one is simply down (I'm guessing forever) and the first one has some issues like not supporting passive mode. Not to put those efforts down, but FTP access to Azure doesn't seem like a solved problem yet.

Thank you for your feedback, but for the moment my progress was stalled by the Microsoft itself -- they don't accept subscriptions from Ukraine yet, so I'll need to get someone to get me an account first, and I guess I'll implement the Rackspace CloudFiles, Google Docs and maybe Google Storage backends first.

If anyone else has any input on the matter, I'll be checking back on this topic periodically, so do leave a comment.

Answer 4

Very interesting