How to clean an Azure storage Blob container?
I just want to clean (dump, zap, del .) an Azure Blob container. How can I do that?
Note: The container is used by IIS (running Webrole) logs (wad-iis-logfiles).
Answer
There is only one way to bulk delete blobs and that is by deleting the entire container. As you've said there is a delay between deleting the container and when you can use that container name again.
Your only other choice is to delete the one at a time. If you can do the deleting from the same data centre where the blobs are stored it will be faster than running the delete locally. This probably means writing code (or you could RDP into one of your instances and install cloud explorer). If you're writing code then you can speed up the overall process by deleting the items in parallel. Something similar to this would work:
Parallel.ForEach(myCloudBlobClient.GetContainerReference(myContainerName).ListBlobs(), x => ((CloudBlob) x).Delete());