Azure Storage Integration

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud platform and it offers cloud storage, we assume for you to stumble here you have Azure cloud Storage as your bucket for media files.

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Creating an Azure Storage Account

In the Quick navigation area of the Azure console, we can see a storage account clickable icon.

A storage Account is similar to S3 or GCP cloud storage. We can then click on the add button in the storage account dashboard where can create the storage account.

After reviewing and creating the Storage Account and clicking go-to resources, we land on the Storage Account Dashboard. Here we can navigate the other options available such as upload, storage exploration etc.

One key thing to note is Azure uploads require containers, and Azure’s containers are like-so for AWS S3 and GCP Bucket, we will leave the creation of the container to your discretion. All uploads made in a particular storage account are made into a selected and specified container, and in our case fetching media data (Videos and Images) in directories and subsequent sub-directories can only be gotten from containers. To empower Ocular to fetch media resources on your behalf for data annotations, you will need to fetch the Storage Account Name and Storage Account Key.

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Fetching Azure Storage Keys

Unlike GCP interoperability where you’d have to create the Access and Secret Keys, Azure creates the Storage Account Keys on your behalf and you can also rotate the generated keys. Ocular is interested in the Storage Account name, Key and container name [Where the media files live]. To locate the Key and Storage Account Name, on the left action section in the storage account, we can see Security + Networking.

By clicking on the dropdown we see the Access Key, and by clicking on Access Key we get to where the information of interest lives.

With the Storage Account Name, Key and Container Name information Ocular will be empowered to list files , directories and subdirectories within the buckets.