I've got a website that will need to access a file on the file system (or somewhere) containing some template text used to send an email. I'd like a suggestion for where to store the file and how to access / find the file at runtime for both azure web roles and azure web sites.
So far, I've read about Azure Local Storage, but that seems to only be an option for web roles, and not available for azure websites (I think?). Plus, I'm not sure how the file would make its way into the storage.
The other option I was thinking about was adding the file to the VS solution and marking it as content, in which case I believe it would be deployed with the other files. But in this case, I don't know how to get the path to access the file form the .NET code. Also, with this, I believe that I would need to redeploy the entire solution in order to update the file.
I would appreciate any thoughts on this. Thanks...
Using a non-local storage system is your best approach, it is highly unlikely your speed requirements will be that intense it will need intense performance improvements.
I would recommend blob storage in the same region as your website/cloud service.
If you have extreme loads and need that file loaded rapidly, then have an in-memory cache set to 5 minutes or something low to store the template. Each time it checks the cache, if its not there it loads in the cache from storage then provides the resource.
You may look at using cache if you are getting a constant 1 request per second or higher. Anything lower than that then just stick to reading on demand directly from the blob storage.
If you really want to get something locally off the disk then do