The Azure Storage APIs are a bit confusing and misleading

[IEvangelist]

Background and Motivation

The current Azure Storage API is a bit confusing and misleading. Today, when you call AddAzureStorage it adds provisioning and infrastructure details, including roles, to the Azure storage resource for blobs, queues, and tables. This happens regardless of whether or not you call AddBlobs, AddQueues, or AddTables. It might make more sense to instead change these specific APIs to be GetBlobs, GetQueues, and GetTables instead without the name parameter.

Proposed API

namespace Aspire.Hosting;

public static class AzureStorageExtensions
{
    public static IResourceBuilder<AzureStorageResource> AddAzureStorage(
        this IDistributedApplicationBuilder builder, [ResourceName] string name)
    {
        // ...
    }

   // Omitted for brevity...

    public static IResourceBuilder<AzureBlobStorageResource> GetBlobs(
        this IResourceBuilder<AzureStorageResource> builder);

    public static IResourceBuilder<AzureTableStorageResource> GetTables(
        this IResourceBuilder<AzureStorageResource> builder);

    public static IResourceBuilder<AzureQueueStorageResource> GetQueues(
        this IResourceBuilder<AzureStorageResource> builder);
}

Usage Examples

var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

var storage = builder.AddAzureStorage("storage").RunAsEmulator(static container =>
{
    container.WithDataBindMount();
});

var blobs = storage.GetBlobs();
var queues = storage.GetQueues();
var table = storage.GetTables();

// Use storage bits...

builder.Build().Run();

Alternative Designs

Risks

This is a breaking change, and will require obsoleting existing AddBlobs, AddQueues, and AddTables APIs.

[davidfowl]

I’m not sure this is a valuable breaking change to make.

[eerhardt]

I’m not sure this is a valuable breaking change to make.

We could do it without a breaking change. We could add the new .Get methods and obsolete / hide the .Add methods.

[davidfowl]

I think we need a more fleshed out proposal. The proposed methods here have no resource names, it's unclear to me how this works (or is this just a rename from Add to Get?)

[eerhardt]

The part that is confusing to me is that you aren't really "adding" a blobs service to a storage account. You get a blobs service (as well as queues and tables services) for every account.

You are only "adding" the blobs service to the .NET Aspire model. And you only need a name for .NET Aspire. It doesn't show up in Azure at all.

[davidfowl]

You are only "adding" the blobs service to the .NET Aspire model. And you only need a name for .NET Aspire. It doesn't show up in Azure at all.

Right but this is the an aspire API for Azure storage, not an azure storage API. Each of those services gets their own connection string. In theory, they don't need to be AddX, they could be properties with names derived from the storage resource.

The advantage of keeping the Add is that there's intent from the user that they want to use blobs/queues/tables. We could (and should) use that to inform role assignments.

[IEvangelist]

I’m not sure this is a valuable breaking change to make.

We could do it without a breaking change. We could add the new .Get methods and obsolete / hide the .Add methods.

Those are still technically considered breaking changes though, but that's that way I'd recommend doing it.

[davidfowl]

If we pivot this API away from the current model, do we still have names or are those resources get a name derived from storage? Customers also have to know the name because it needs to be referenced by the client app as a connection string.

[eerhardt]

If we pivot this API away from the current model, do we still have names or are those resources get a name derived from storage? Customers also have to know the name because it needs to be referenced by the client app as a connection string.

I'm not sure. Maybe the name is derived from storage.

var storage = builder.AddAzureStorage("mystorage");

var blobs = storage.GetBlobs(); // implied name "mystorage-blobs"
var queues = storage.GetQueues(); // implied name "mystorage-queues"
var table = storage.GetTables(); // implied name "mystorage-tables"

Or you pass the name into the .Get method:

var storage = builder.AddAzureStorage("mystorage");

var blobs = storage.GetBlobs("blobs");
var queues = storage.GetQueues("queues");
var table = storage.GetTables("tables");