Cognitive Search and Blob Storage Costing questions

Question

Hi,

I need some clarifications on the costing of Azure Cognitive Search and its components.

1. Semantic search is said to be charged daily. But I haven't been able to find the cost per day or the cost per transaction. What is the daily cost of using semantic search?
2. Are there costs involved in using the indexer, data sources, etc? Or are those included in the cost of Cognitive search service plan?
3. In the pricing documentation, what does it mean for "max 300 GB per service"? Does that mean I can only index 25GB of documents but the total storage space including replicas cannot exceed 300GB?

Similarly, I would like confirmation/clarification on Blob storage pricing as well.

1. On discussion with my supervisor, it seems like the Blob storage pricing is oddly cheap.

So for example, we plan on storing 300GB in Blob storage (Hot) and aim to do around 2000 writes and 400 reads a day. So that would be only (3000.02) +30(20000.065/10000) + 30(400*0.005/10000) = $6.396/month

Is this the correct calculation? Or am I missing anything key?

Thank you.

Johanan

Answer 1

Hi.

This is quite a large question that may have been better split into 2 but I will try my best to answer all parts.

Starting with cognitive search.

1. If you create a search service and go to the Semantic Search page it will show you the cost. This shows as ~£405 in my Azure portal but I am not sure if this varies etc.
2. Indexers, data sources etc are all include in the price upto the quota. However the extra services such as Image Extraction, Semantic Search, and the Custom Entity LookUp skill all cost extra.
3. The 300GB limit is set by the max number of partitions. In the case of S1 it is 25*12 hence the 300GB total limit. If you were to have 2 partitions then it would be a max of 50GB.

Blob storage is very cheap and I think your calculations make sense. Just be aware that an operation on block blobs is per block which is explained here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61145716/azure-blob-storage-what-exactly-does-write-operations-mean.

Hope this helps.