Azure Queues Storage Pricing

General

• If I use Storage for only a few days a month, is the cost prorated?

  Yes. Storage capacity is billed in units of the average daily amount of data stored, in gigabytes (GB), over a monthly period. For example, if you consistently used 10 GB of storage for the first half of the month and none for the second half of the month, you would be billed for your average usage of 5 GB of storage.

• How do I know which data redundancy option (LRS, GRS, RA-GRS) I am using?

  Storage accounts by default are set up to be geographically redundant. You can change these settings to read-access geographically redundant or locally redundant through the Microsoft Azure classic portal or the service management API. You can also check the status on the portal on using the service management API.

• How does RA-GRS billing work?

  Storage accounts will be charged for a minimum of 30 days from the time the service is enabled. For example, if RA-GRS is turned on 1st May and turned off on 5th May, the storage account will be charged for RA-GRS up to 30th May. After that, GRS pricing would start.

  If RA-GRS is turned on 1st May and turned off on 14th June, RA-GRS would be charged up to 14th June. On June 15, GRS pricing would take effect.

Blob Storage

• What is a Blob Storage Account and how is it different from a general-purpose Storage Account?

  A Blob Storage Account is a storage account specialised for storing data as blobs and allows users to specify an access tier based on the frequency of access for the data in that account. General-purpose storage accounts can be used to store Blobs as well as Files, Disks, Tables, and Queues.

• Have the prices of Block Blobs in general purpose Storage Accounts changed?

  No. Block Blob prices in general purpose Storage Account have not changed and can be seen here.

• When looking at my Azure bill, how can I tell whether I am being charged for a Blob Storage Account or Blobs in general-purpose Storage Accounts?

  If you see “Hot” or “Cool” in the resource name, it means that the charge is associated with Blob Storage Accounts. For example, when you see “Standard IO - Cool Block Blob (GB)” in your bill, it means you are using and being charged for Blob Storage Accounts, while “Standard IO – Block Blob (GB)” is the meter associated with the use of Block Blobs in general-purpose Storage accounts.

• What are Hot and Cool access tiers and how should I determine which one to use?

  When you create a Blob Storage Account, you can set the access tier as Cool or Hot. Cool tier has a lower cost of storing data but a higher cost of accessing data, and it should be used for data that is not frequently accessed, and has lower availability SLA requirements. If you do not know the access pattern for your data, we recommend that you start with the Hot tier for at least a month and then determine whether you can save costs by moving to Cool storage based on your actual usage. See the example below.

  Example

  You have 50 TB of data that you want to store in Blob Storage in US East 2 region. You send 10 M HTTP operations to the account every month, 20% of which are Put Blob/Block, List, and Create Container operations. You read 20 TB of data from the account every month, and write 10 TB of data. This is how your total cost will be calculated in Hot vs. Cool.

  Unit of Measure	Usage volume	Price in Cool	Price in Hot	Monthly cost in Cool	Monthly cost in Hot
  GB per month	50*1,024= 51,200	$0.01	$0.024	$512	$1228.8
  10,000 Put Blob/Block, List, Create Container Operations	20% * 10M /10,000 = 200	$0.1	$0.05	$20	$10
  10,000 Operations, others	80% * 10M /10,000 = 800	$0.01	$0.004	$8	$3.2
  GB of Data Retrieved	20 * 1,024 = 20,480	$0.01	$0	$204.8	$0
  GB of Data Written	10 * 1,024 = 10,240	$0.0025	$0	$25.6	$0
  Total Monthly Cost				$770.4	$1242

  In this example, the total monthly cost of Cool tier adds up to $770.4, vs $1242 in Hot tier. You will realise substantial cost savings by moving your data to the Cool tier in this example.

• Do I get charged for Data Retrieval if I toggle my Blob Storage Account from Cool to Hot?

  You will be charged for Data Retrieval when you toggle your Blob Storage Account from Cool to Hot—for example, if you have 100 GB of data in a Blob Storage Account and you toggle that account from Cool to Hot, you will be charged 100 * $0.01 = $1 for Data Retrieval.

• Do I get charged for Data Writes if I toggle my Blob Storage Account from Hot to Cool?

  No. If you toggle your account from Hot to Cool, you will not be charged for Data Writes. You will only get charged for Data Writes if you directly write data to your Blob Storage Account with Cool access tiers.

• What is the Geo-Replication Data Transfer Charge?

  When you write data into GRS accounts, that data will be replicated to another Azure region. The Geo-Replication Data Transfer charge is the bandwidth cost of replicating that data to another Azure region.

Disk Storage

• If I attach an empty 100-GB disk to my virtual machine, will I be charged for the entire 100 GB or just the storage space I use?

  If the empty 100-GB disk is backed by a Premium Storage Account then you will be charged for a P0 (128-GB) disk. If any other type of Storage Account is used then you will only be billed for the storage space used to store the data that is written to the disk, regardless of the allocated disk size.

• Is Premium Storage covered under the same SLA as other storage services?

  Yes. 99.9% read/write availability also applies to Premium Storage accounts.