Break an Infinite Lease on an Azure Storage Account Container

On rare occasions you may find yourself with an empty storage account container that has an infinite lease on it. This can make it near impossible to remove the container without opening a support case with Microsoft. While there are several tools and script samples available to break the lease on a blob there are few that address a lease on a container. The following should help identify if your container has an “infinite” lease and how to remove the lease.

Symptoms:

The following are symptoms of an infinite lease on a empty container:

1. When viewing the properties of the container through the portal (https://portal.azure.com) you will see the lease period set to “infinite”.
2. When deleting the Azure storage container though the new portal (https://portal.azure.com) you get the following error:
   • “Failed to delete storage container 'MyLeasedContainer'. Error: There is currently a lease on the container and no lease ID was specified in the request.”"
3. When deleting the Azure storage container though the old portal(https://manage.windowsazure.com) you get the following error:
   • “There is currently a lease on the container and no lease ID was specified in the request. RequestId:5f0e6c7c-0001-00ec-7df9-0fc697000000 Time:2016-09-16T09:04:45.6778058Z”

Resolution:

The following script sample can help break this lease. Replace the property values of $StorageAccountName, $StorageAccountKey, and $ContainerName with the correct values of the container with the infinite lease.

[powershell]

$StorageAccountName = "MyStorageAccount"

$StorageAccountKey = "flmuQKvp7L6G8ga0IXLMnPJogSacsFPofKBv1g2sJhfcecVyrWtu+AMweHNwgSk6dAkOWTGx1viyQp/0aMRkBw=="

$ContainerName = "MyLeasedContainer"

$Creds = New-Object Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.Auth.StorageCredentials("$StorageAccountName","$StorageAccountKey")

$CloudStorageAccount = New-Object Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.CloudStorageAccount($creds, $true)

$CloudBlobClient = $CloudStorageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient()

$BlobContainer = $CloudBlobClient.GetContainerReference($ContainerName)

$BlobContainer.BreakLease($(New-TimeSpan), $null, $null, $null)

[/powershell]