Azure Storage Demo Populator

A .NET console app that continuously generates real, but dummy activity, across one or more Azure Storage accounts. It creates random containers, tables, queues, and file shares, then uploads blobs, inserts table rows, pushes queue messages, and writes files in parallel bursts.

Useful for demos, exploring Azure Storage Discovery, testing throttling behavior, and making empty accounts look production-like.

See the companion blog post: How to populate Azure Storage Accounts with demo data

Prerequisites

• .NET 9 SDK (or newer)
• One or more Azure Storage accounts

Authentication

Uses DefaultAzureCredential from the Azure Identity SDK. This works with Managed Identity, Azure CLI, Visual Studio, and other credential sources — no secrets required.

Provide storage account names as arguments:

dotnet run -- --accounts mystorageaccount1 mystorageaccount2 mystorageaccount3

The tool connects to each account via https://{name}.blob.core.windows.net (and the corresponding table, queue, and file endpoints).

Note: The signed-in identity needs the following data-plane roles on each storage account:

• Storage Blob Data Contributor (blob containers & blobs)
• Storage Table Data Contributor (tables & entities)
• Storage Queue Data Contributor (queues & messages)
• Storage File Data Privileged Contributor (file shares & files — required for OAuth with ShareTokenIntent.Backup)

Usage

1. Clone the repo

   git clone https://github.com/Zimmergren/azure-storage-demo-populator.git
   cd azure-storage-demo-populator

2. Build

   dotnet build

3. Run

   dotnet run -- --accounts storageaccount1 storageaccount2

   With a speed profile:

   dotnet run -- --speed medium --accounts storageaccount1 storageaccount2

Speed profiles

Profile	Description
slow	Small batches (20–80 items), longer pauses
medium	Moderate batches (200–800 items)
fastest	Large batches (800–2500 items), minimal pauses
random	(default) Randomly switches between profiles to simulate organic load

What it does

• Creates 20–50 randomly named containers, tables, queues, and file shares per account on startup
• Rotates between configured storage accounts approximately once per minute
• Randomly selects an operation type (blob upload, table insert, queue message, file write)
• Runs operations in parallel with occasional "mega-burst" spikes (2–4× normal volume)
• Continues indefinitely until stopped (Ctrl+C)
• Can generate multi-million transactions quickly — consider how long you leave it running

Resource naming

All resources created by this tool are prefixed with demo- (or demot for tables, which don't allow hyphens):

Resource type	Name pattern	Example
Blob container	demo-c{8hex}	demo-c4a8f1b2e
Table	demot{8hex}	demot4a8f1b2e
Queue	demo-q{8hex}	demo-q4a8f1b2e
File share	demo-s{8hex}	demo-s4a8f1b2e
Blobs	demo-blob-{guid}.txt
Files	demo-file-{guid}.txt
Table rows	partition key demo-p{1-100}

This makes it easy to identify and selectively delete demo data.

Cleanup

All resources are prefixed with demo- (or demot for tables), making them easy to identify and delete manually in the Azure Portal or via scripts. Alternatively, delete the demo storage account(s) entirely.