title: Is it better to have many small Azure storage blob containers (each with some blobs) or one really large container with tons of blobs?
body: <p>So the scenario is the following:</p>
  
  <p>I have a multiple instances of a web service that writes a blob of data to Azure Storage. I need to be able to group blobs into a container (or a virtual directory) depending on when it was received. Once in a while (every day at the worst) older blobs will get processed and then deleted. </p>
  
  <p>I have two options:</p>
  
  <p><strong>Option 1</strong></p>
  
  <p>I make one container called "blobs" (for example) and then store all the blogs into that container. Each blob will use a directory style name with the directory name being the time it was received (e.g. "hr0min0/data.bin", "hr0min0/data2.bin", "hr0min30/data3.bin", "hr1min45/data.bin", ... , "hr23min0/dataN.bin", etc - a new directory every <em>X</em> minutes). The thing that processes these blobs will process hr0min0 blobs first, then hr0minX and so on (and the blobs are still being written when being processed). </p>
  
  <p><strong>Option 2</strong></p>
  
  <p>I have many containers each with a name based on the arrival time (so first will be a container called blobs_hr0min0 then blobs_hr0minX, etc) and all the blobs in the container are those blobs that arrived at the named time. The thing that processes these blogs will process one container at a time.</p>
  
  <p>So my question is, which option is better? Does option 2 give me better parallelization (since a containers can be in different servers) or is option 1 better because many containers can cause other unknown issues?</p>