The Alfresco Content Connector for Azure is an add-on module that provides an alternative content store. It uses Microsoft’s Azure Blob Storage as the storage mechanism for Alfresco Content Services, allowing for virtually unlimited and inexpensive storage.

New features introduced in v1.2 are:

• Azure content store subsystems
• Multiple Azure storage container configuration
  • Two content store subsystems are provided out-of-the-box with this release: Azure and AzureOnPrem. The default subsystem that’s enabled on installation is AzureOnPrem. See Azure Connector content store subsystems for more details.

Other features introduced in previous versions include:

• Support for Azure Blob Storage for on-premises or Azure Cloud installation of Content Services
• Support for hot and cool access tiers (based on storage account)
• Based on the Azure SDK for Java (v12.6.1)
• Storage path approach optimized for high-throughput reads and writes
• Configurable retries and timeouts for large file uploads and downloads

Note: The Alfresco Content Connector for Azure module can be applied to Content Services 6.2 or later.

Note: For improved performance of the Azure Connector, you may wish to run your Content Services instance on an Azure VM connected to Azure Blob storage.

The following diagram shows a simple representation of how Content Services and the Azure Connector interact with Azure resources. The storage account has a Blob container, which in turn contains Blobs. The naming convention is flat and only consists of the content UUID which follows Microsoft’s recommendations. See Naming and Referencing Containers, Blobs, and Metadata for more details.