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Does anyone have any familiarity or experience using BITS for downloads from Azure blob storage and/or CDN?

There is surprisingly little information about BITS and Azure that I have found via internet searches and everything seems to relate to WebRoles and self-managed VM's where we have IIS. I have found nothing on BITS downloading directly from a blob URL. Specifically I need to figure out if blobs are served over HTTP in a manner that supports BITS requirements - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa362846(v=vs.85).aspx.

I'm going to do some of my own testing soon so I will report my findings but any information would be awesome!

dbstrat
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  • It's easy to test, install BitsAdmin (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa362813(v=vs.85).aspx) and configure a job for a blob url. – Simon Mourier Aug 10 '12 at 15:17
  • If you are interested in Microsoft adding support for BITS uploads, please vote for the feature: http://feedback.azure.com/forums/217298-storage/suggestions/9713046-support-background-intelligent-transfer-service-b – codekaizen Sep 11 '15 at 04:42

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I forgot to come back and post my own findings. First off, thanks Simon for the link...

I did some exploratory testing using http://sharpbits.codeplex.com/ to initiate some BITS transfers from already existing blobs and to try to upload as well. I was able to download a public\anonymous blob over http and https. This was quite some time ago and today I have this as a live scenario running perfectly fine in a dev environment.

Uploading to blob storage, on the other hand, failed with a 400 syntax error response. I did not investigate the upload issue any further since I didn't need BITS uploads in my particular case so that is still an open part of the question which I will return to when I have need or urge.

dbstrat
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  • I'd say it won't work since BITS needs the server endpoint to send custom HTTP headers: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa362828%28v=vs.85%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 – codekaizen Sep 07 '15 at 10:03
  • It does seem possible to use BITS Uploads with both S3 and Azure Blob using pre-signed URLs, but I don't see a point since it forces BITS to use Foreground mode. That eliminates the "nice" functions of BITS like not taking bandwidth when constrained, on cellular, or battery power. See [`SetHttpMethod`](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/bits10_2/nf-bits10_2-ibackgroundcopyjobhttpoptions2-sethttpmethod) or the `-HttpMethod` parameter of `Start-BitsTransfer` – Mitch Feb 27 '22 at 16:19