Design of a Blob Store
Learn how to incorporate certain requirements into the design of a blob store.
We'll cover the following...
High-level design
Let’s identify and connect the components of a blob store system. At a high level, the components are clients, front-end servers, and storage disks.
The client’s requests are received at the front-end servers that process the request. The front-end servers store the client’s blob onto the storage disks attached to them.
API design
Let’s look into the API design of the blob store. All of the functions below can only be performed by a registered and authenticated user. For the sake of brevity, we don’t include functionalities like registration and authentication of users.
Create container
The createContainer operation creates a new container under the logged-in account from which this request is being generated.
createContainer(containerName)
Parameter | Description |
| This is the name of the container. It should be unique within a storage account. |
Upload blobs
The client’s data is stored in the form of Bytes in the blob store. The data can be put into a container with the following code:
putBlob(containerPath, blobName, data)
Parameter | Description |
| This is the path of the container in which we upload the blob. It consists of the |
| This is the name of the blob. It should be unique within a container, otherwise our system will give the blob that was uploaded later a version number. |
| This is a file that the user wants to upload to the blob store. |
Note: This API is just a logical way to spell out needs. We might use a multistep streaming call for actual implementation if the data size is very large.
Download blobs
Blobs are identified by their unique name or ID.
getBlob(blobPath)
Parameter | Description |
| This is the fully qualified path of the data or file, including its unique ID. |
Delete blob
The deleteBlob operation marks the specified blob for deletion. The actual blob is deleted during garbage collection.
deleteBlob(blobPath)
Parameter | Description |
| This is the path of the blob that the user wants to delete. |
List blobs
The listBlobs operation returns a list of blobs under the specified container or path.
listBlobs(containerPath)
Parameter | Description |
| This is the path to the container from which the user wants to get the list of blobs. |
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