How NFS file share cost works

Question

When I upload 2TB data to NFS file share how the cost is calculated ? what’s the difference between NFS and file share?

Answer 1

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

Adding more information to the above response!

SMB Azure file shares are accessible from Windows, Linux, and macOS clients. NFS Azure file shares are accessible from Linux clients. Additionally, SMB Azure file shares can be cached on Windows servers with Azure File Sync for fast access near where the data is being used.

NFS file shares are often used in the following scenarios:

• Backing storage for Linux/UNIX-based applications, such as line-of-business applications written using Linux or POSIX file system APIs (even if they don't require POSIX-compliance).
• Workloads that require POSIX-compliant file shares, case sensitivity, or Unix style permissions (UID/GID).

New application and service development, particularly if that application or service has a requirement for random I/O and hierarchical storage.
Note

NFS 4.1 is only available for premium file shares, which use the provisioned billing model. Transactions don't affect billing for premium file shares.

Nfsv3 has a write scheduler which merges and batches client writes into fewer larger write calls to Blob backend.

It merges contiguous client IOs into larger IOs up to a max block size (100MB today) and can batch multiple of such PBs (Put Block) to reduce PBL (Put Block List) calls. In short, let’s say client sends 500x1MB requests some of which are sequential (by offset) and some or not. We will try to merge the sequential ones into larger PB calls and make multiple of these PB calls in parallel (up to 64) and then issue a single PBL call to commit blocks uploaded using all those parallel PB calls.   To get the best performance, the server should get chunks of the file in a sequence. ( E.g. cp command in Unix system sends a file sequentially.) |

Note: This cost can go up as the "Max size per write in a Put Block(in mb)" decreases. E.g. if it were reduced to 50, the cost would double to $8. 

When you upload 2TB of data to an NFS file share, the cost is calculated based on the amount of data stored in the file share and the storage tier that you're using. Azure offers several storage tiers for file shares, including Standard and Premium tiers. The cost per GB of storage varies depending on the storage tier and the region where the file share is located. In addition to the storage cost, there may be additional costs associated with data transfer, data access, and other operations performed on the file share. For example, if you're accessing the file share from a different region or over the internet, there may be additional data transfer costs. You can find more information about Azure file share pricing on the Azure website.

  If you have any questions related to Storage billing , please contact   Billing and Subscription team would be the best to provide more insight and guidance on this scenario: it's free, and it's the best choice for you.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/options/

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

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Answer 2

That would depend on whether you are using NFS 4.1 - which is only available for premium file shares, which use the provisioned billing model. Transactions don't affect billing for premium file shares. For standard file shares, the cost would include both the transaction cost and storage (per GB) pricing components. For premium, the former doesn't apply. More at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/files/understanding-billing and https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/files/

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hth Marcin