Currently, I am working on a project that requires zipping and compressing files that exist on a storage account. Unfortunately, unless I am missing something, there is no out-of-the box way how to ZIP files on an Azure storage.

There are two major possibilities that I’ve found are:

• Azure Data Factory – It’s a cloud based ETL storage solution. In my research, I found that this tool can cost quite a lot, since you’re paying for the rented machines and tasks. Data Factory – Data Integration Service | Microsoft Azure
• Writing a bespoke solution – of course you’ve got the flexibility of doing whatever you want but it probably takes more time to develop, test and such.

Anyway, in my case I’ve decided to write my own application; there were other requirements that I needed to satisfy, which was it too complex for me to implement it in Azure Data Factory. I’ve written the following code (some code omitted for brevity)

CloudBlockBlob blob = targetStorageAccountContainer.GetBlockBlobReference("zipfile.zip");
blob.StreamWriteSizeInBytes = 104_857_600;      

using (Stream dataLakeZipFile = await blob.OpenWriteAsync())
using (var zipStream = new ZipOutputStream(dataLakeZipFile))
{
    DataLakeDirectoryClient sourceDirectoryClient = dataLakeClient.GetDirectoryClient(sourceDataLakeAccount);
    await foreach(var blobItem in sourceDirectoryClient.GetPathsAsync(recursive: true, cancellationToken: cancellationToken))   
    {
        zipStream.PutNextEntry(new ZipEntry(blobItem.Name));
        var httpResponseMessage = await _httpClient.GetAsync(GetFileToAddToZip(blobItem.Name), HttpCompletionOption.ResponseHeadersRead);
        using (Stream httpStream = await httpResponseMessage.Content.ReadAsStreamAsync())
        {
            await httpStream.CopyToAsync(zipStream);
        }

        zipStream.CloseEntry();
    }

    zipStream.Finish();
}  

The following code does this following:

• Create a reference to the ZIP file that is going to be created on the Storage Account. I also set StreamWriteSizeInBytes to 100MB; the largest. I never experimented with other figures. This refers to how much data to write per block.
• Open a Stream object against the zip file. This overwrites any file with the same name.
• Get all the files you need to ZIP. In my case, I am using the DataLake API because our files are on a Storage Account with hierarchical namespaces activated. This will work just as fine if your Storage Account doesn’t use hierarchical namspaces (you can just swap out and use the CloudBlobContainer API).
• Open a new connection to the destination file and fetch it as a stream.
• Copy the data received from the stream to the zip stream. This translates into HTTP requests, uploading it back to the Storage Account.
• Close down all resources when its done.

Importantly, the code downloads files from the storage account and instantly uploads it back to the storage account as a ZIP. This does not store any data on physical disk and uses RAM to buffer the data as its downloaded and uploaded.

Of course, this part is just an excerpt of the whole system needed, but it can be adapted accordingly.

Until the next one!