Azure Weekly Insights

- [Instructor] During this series, I have covered Azure file shares, which allow you to use Azure as a central file repository for your organization. But what if you want to share data outside of your organization? Well, there's a new service that will allow you to do that, Azure Data Share. In this week's insight, we're going to take a look at this new service in action. The first thing we need to do is create the data share. You can go ahead and search for that in the marketplace. And then go ahead and create it. We need to provide a name, your subscription and resource group, and then the location, and you'll notice that currently, only three locations are supported. And go ahead and create. And this will take a moment. Now that our data share has been created, we can go ahead and start sharing our data. And I do want to make this very clear, that the data share itself does not hold any data, it's not a repository. All it is is a mechanism for managing a repository within Azure. And you'll see that as we step through sharing our data. We need to create a share, you'll need to provide a share name, a description if you wish, and terms of use. If you do not enter anything in the terms of use, the recipient does not have to acknowledge that they've seen this. By entering in the terms of use, the recipient must acknowledge this. Our next step is to add the dataset. And you can add Azure Blob Storage or Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 or Gen2. For this demonstration, I have already created a Blob Storage account. And it contains a container called images. Next, we need to enter in the email, and these must be Azure email addresses, for our recipients. For this demonstration I'm using an account within the same subscription, but this is where you'd put in an email for an outside organization. Moving on to Settings, it's here we can create a snapshot. If you do not create a snapshot, then the recipient will not receive any updates to that share on a schedule, they'll have to manually trigger a sync. I'm going to leave this as is. We can finally review and create our share. And there it is. At this point, I am now going to pop into the recipient, or the Watson account, to set it up on their end. In Watson's email, we can see that there is an Azure Data Share invitation. We can go ahead and select that and then view the invitation. And this will open up the data share invitation in the Azure portal. Select the invitation, and because I entered in the terms of use, I must agree to it. Our next step is to create a target data share account. Select your subscription, your resource group, and if you do not have a data share account already created, you'll need to create a new one, and that's what I'm going to do here. And fill out the rest of the information as required. You can go ahead and create it, and it will take a few moments to create. Now that the data share account has been created, we can accept and configure now, reject everything, or accept and configure later. We're going to go ahead and accept and configure now. And as you can see, we're still not done. Now we have to provide the target storage setting. And this is the mapping to the location where these files are going to be saved. Select your resource group and your storage account. I have already created one for this demonstration. Next I need to provide a container for the files. And this does have to be in lowercase as it is a container. Now our data share has been created, let's go ahead and take a look at it. We have the details of our data share itself. And in Datasets, you'll find the mapping to our storage container. If I select this path now, you'll notice that we do not have any containers in this storage account. In order to copy those files into the storage account, pop back to Details and then trigger a snapshot. I'm going to go ahead and select a full copy. And this will take a few moments for those files to be copied to your container. We can now see that the last run status is succeeded. Let's pop back into Datasets and then follow that path. We can see we have a new container. Within that container, we have a folder called images, and I have some images within this folder. These files are now available in the recipient's storage account. When the recipient wants to update this folder, I'll go back to Details and trigger a snapshot. If we had set up snapshots when we were configuring the share initially, then the recipient would be able to go in and have those snapshots automatically trigger and download to their storage account. And there you have it, Azure Data Share. It's a great way to share data outside of your organization.