Building a Developer-First Cloud Storage Platform on Azure Blob (Lessons Learned)

When you build apps long enough, you eventually run into file storage. User uploads. Media previews. Private downloads. Public sharing. Expiring links. Access control. On paper, services like S3 and Firebase Storage solve this. In practice, I kept running into friction: Overly complex permission models Confusing bucket structures Boilerplate-heavy integrations Public/private edge cases Performance surprises with large files So I decided to build a storage layer from scratch on top of Azure Blob Storage and document what I learned along the way. This eventually became FileFreak.io , but the more interesting part is the architecture and tradeoffs. Why Not Just Use S3 Directly? You absolutely can. But most applications don't need the full flexibility of S3. They need: Secure uploads Private-by-default storage Controlled sharing Clean metadata management Reliable streaming Good UX The problem is not raw storage. It's everything around it. Architecture Overview High-level stack: Backend: No