Add support for bam/bai files in Azure blob storage

[smrgit]

I don't know if the work done to support Google Cloud Storage and Amazon S3 just "magically works" for Azure blob storage, but I did not find any specific mention in the htslib documentation. If Azure is already supported, please close this out, and if not, it would be great to know if this is on the roadmap. (I searched and did not find any existing open issue.)

[whitwham]

Sorry for not replying sooner. So htslib currently does not support Azure storage, I'm not even sure anyone has asked for it before. We would like to support it but it would require us to get access to Azure which may take a while.

[hmeiland]

Happy to help here; already did the same for https://github.com/cvmfs/cvmfs.

[CreRecombinase]

A mirror of the 1000 genomes ftp site is publicly available through Azure Open Datasets

[daviesrob]

Thanks, we'll take a look.

[smrgit]

checking in on this since it seems like there have been some recent comments -- is there any movement on this? I may be able to request support from Microsoft/Azure, would that be helpful?

[whitwham]

We did have a talk with @hmeiland (who is/was with Microsoft) but nothing really came of it.