Azure Front Door with Azure Storage Blobs

Question

Hello!
We have an Azure Blob Storage account containing a large number of media files (.MP4). These files are manually organized into categorized folders under a single container. Our goal is to allow all corporate users to access the container and watch the media files directly in their browsers - no streaming or additional services, just simple playback.

I initially tried using Static Website Hosting with a pre-generated index.html, but generating SAS tokens for every file is not a feasible solution due to the large number of files.

I decided to implement Azure Front Door for the storage account, and it seems to work for file access, but I can't configure it to require user authentication.
How can I configure Azure Front Door to enforce Microsoft Entra ID authentication for accessing storage resources?

Answer 1

Hello Artem Shaturskyi,

Thanks for posting your question in the Microsoft Q&A forum.

Azure Front Door doesn't natively support Microsoft Entra ID authentication for direct blob access. However, you can achieve this by using a combination of Azure Front Door, Azure Functions, and Azure Storage.

• Create an Azure Function App: Develop an HTTP-triggered function that acts as a proxy between Front Door and Blob Storage and implement Microsoft Entra ID authentication in the function.
• Configure Azure Front Door: Set up a backend pool pointing to your Azure Function App, then create routing rules to direct traffic to the function.
• Implement authentication and authorization: Use Microsoft.Identity.Web library in your Azure Function to handle Microsoft Entra ID authentication, validate user tokens and permissions in the function.
• Proxy requests to Blob Storage: Once authenticated, use the Azure Storage SDK in your function to retrieve the requested blob, stream the blob content back to the client through the function response.
• Configure CORS: Set up CORS rules on your Storage account to allow requests from your Front Door endpoint.

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