How to access Azure Storage Emulator (Local) over wifi?

Question

I am following the information in this documentation to access azure storage emulator (locally)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/hh403989.aspx

In the storage emulator, because the local computer does not perform domain name resolution, the account name is part of the URI path. The URI scheme for a resource running in the storage emulator follows this format:

http://<local-machine-address>:<port>/<account-name>/<resource-path>

The following format is used for addressing resources running in the storage emulator:

Blob Service:

http://127.0.0.1:10000/<account-name>/<resource-path>

Queue Service:

http://127.0.0.1:10001/<account-name>/<resource-path>

Table Service:

http://127.0.0.1:10002/<account-name>/<resource-path>

For example, the following address might be used for accessing a blob in the storage emulator:

http://127.0.0.1:10000/myaccount/mycontainer/myblob.txt

It works fine if I try to access it from anything running on my computer, for example a local IIS server etc, that's because it has access to 127.0.0.1 on the pc

But what if I try to access it from an mobile device on the same wifi network ?

I can access local IIS servers from a mobile device by going to applicationhost.config and binding the local IIS server to the computer LAN IP for example 192.168.1.5 etc

Any idea how can I do this binding for the azure storage emulator ? ie how do I expose it to the LAN ?

Thanks

Answer 1

The local emulation services were not intended for remote access. I do recall reports of folks setting up "loop back" connections to help enable this. But IMHO, in most cases its almost easier and more cost affective to simply run the services in the cloud. This also helps avoid any issues with differences between cloud and on-premises.

If we look at doing mobile device development... You could easily spend several hours trying to properly set up the loopback. If we put a price on this... say $25/hr.. and we spent 3 hours setting it up. So we just spent $75 to build that out. By comparison, we likely could have used that same $75 to do our dev against a cloud storage account for the better part of a year.

Answer 2

I also faced similar issue where I wanted to access the azure storage emulator from another linux host for development. I ended up installing a local proxy server on the windows host which forwards request to the emulator instance.