A while ago we got access to a year of free hosting on Windows Azure (see more about this here). At the time we were using Amazon S3 to store serialized HashMaps of geo-distances. We use these HashMaps to bootstrap our Itinerary Server’s distance cache. Our deployment script is written in ANT, which I guess is lame, but it does the trick for us, and one step in the script is to pull the fresh files from S3. ANT tasks for managing files on S3 have been available for a while, so doing that with S3 was really simple, but I could not find an analogy for Azure, so in order to be able to move from expensive S3 to cheap free Windows Azure I created ANT tasks for uploading and downloading files to/from Azure Storage. I’ve pushed the code to github a while ago, but now, I finally got around to cleaning it up. Enjoy: https://github.com/grishick/azureAnt
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