The Azure SDK for Java recently released a preview of a custom implementation of Java’s FileSystem APIs (the azure-storage-blob-nio package on Maven), enabling developers to access Azure Blob Storage through a familiar file system interface. By adding this new dependency, you can easily instruct the JVM to point all file system operations to Azure Blob Storage rather than the local system. In this article, I will discuss why this tool is useful and some common use cases. I will then describe how this tool fits into the Java ecosystem using code samples that demonstrate how to leverage it. Finally, I will discuss nuances of this tool and thoughts to keep in mind when using it.

I will expand on this later, but it should be emphasized up front that while viewing Blob Storage through the lens of a file system can offer the benefits discussed here, the fact remains that Blob Storage is not a file system, and even this project can only make a best effort at converging the two. The end of the article will discuss implications of this in more depth.

#azure sdk #java #nio #sdk #storage