Is there some miminum billing time for storage costs?

Question

I have to move about 1.5 Billions of small-sized blob from one path to another in the same blob container.

My intention is to move one blob at time (1 server-side copy op + 1 delete op).

Counting number of transaction is simple, I suppose non bandwith costs, but what about space costs?
I suppose the single logical operation (composed by two real ops) will take 500ms or less, so I'll have the single blob space double for a very short time.
What about storage cost? Can I computed storage space in seconds and do appropriate calculation or is there some minimum billing time (eg 1hr) for storage costs?

Answer 1

@Cenzato, Marco Welcome to Microsoft Q&A Forum, Thank you for posting your query here

All prices for storage are calculated in GB and not in a temporal unit of measurement.
For more information, please refer to this article: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/#pricing

• Data storage and metadata are billed per GB on a monthly basis. For data and metadata stored for less than a month, you can estimate the impact on your monthly bill by calculating the cost of each GB per day. You can use a similar approach to estimating the cost of encryption scopes that are in use for less than a month. The number of days in any given month varies. Therefore, to obtain the best approximation of your costs in a given month, make sure to divide the monthly cost by the number of days that occur in that month.
• 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. You can use Azure pricing calculator : Calculate your estimated hourly or monthly costs for using Azure For general-purpose v2 accounts, you are charged for write operations (per 10,000). For Blob storage accounts, there is no charge for Write operations. Pricing for Blob storage accounts and general-purpose v2 accounts is identical for block blob storage, except for data write (per GB) and early deletion charges in the Cool tier. Blob storage accounts charge for Cool tier data writes (per GB) but not Cool tier early deletion, whereas general-purpose v2 accounts charge for Cool tier early deletion but not Cool tier data writes (per GB).

Additional information : There will be a one-time fee equal to the sum of all data multiplied by the geo-replication fee in the primary region. For data stored in the Archive tier, there will also be a charge to read all the data (both read operations per 10,000 blobs and for data retrieval per GB) from the primary region and to write all the data (write operations per 10,000) into the secondary region.

**Note :**If you still have any question: I would recommend to contact Billing and Subscription team would be the best to provide more insight and guidance on this scenario: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/options/ It's a free support

Please let us know if you have any further queries. I’m happy to assist you further.   

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