Azure blob storage pricing

Question

In Azure blob storage pricing calculator,

1. Cost for Data Read & Write is given per GB
2. Cost for operation - Read & Write transaction is given per 10000.

If the monthly cost is based on read/write per 10000 transactions and data read/write per GB. How to calculate the cost for say 5 read transactions?

Answer 1

Hi @Janani - Thanks for reaching out on Q&A Forum.

Azure Storage pricing is based on based on Volume of the data (Capacity), Transaction made over the account (Read/Write) and Bandwidth changes. The charges for different sections are also listed in the below documentations:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/

The costing of operation shall depend on :

What type of transaction was made such as (Read/Write)

If read, from which tier the data was retrieved? Was it Cool/Cold/Archive tier and accordingly the calculation will vary. The bandwidth charges will also incur depending upon where is the storage account and client hosted; accordingly bandwidth charges will occurs

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/bandwidth/#pricing

If write, then the replication charged to other region will be cost.

You can also take a look at the below link which talks about how to plan and manage the costs.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-plan-manage-costs

Please let me know for any further queries and will be glad to assist.

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Answer 2

Hi @Amrinder Singh - Thanks for your quick reply.

I have used Azure Storage Calculator to estimate the pricing

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/

From this, I do understand that the very first factor that affects is Capacity / Storage Cost which is much more significant when compared with read/write.

But I also read that the monthly billing is based on 10000 transactions of read/write and per GB data read/write. What will happen, if we didn't hit even 10000 transactions of read/write in a given tier? Say 100 transactions of read. How much will be the monthly cost?

Answer 3

@Janani The cost is prorated. So the best way to look at transaction cost is to take the price of  a transaction is it is listed in the pricing page. So, currently, a read transaction over the blob endpoint on the hot tier is $0.055 per 10,000 transactions. That means that the effective price of each individual transaction is $0.055 / 10,000 transactions = $0.0000055. If a workload only executed 100 transactions in a billing period, then the bill for those transactions would be $0.0000055 * 100 = $0.00055.

The per GB metric that you are referring to is a Data Retrieval per GB cost and a Data Write per GB cost. That charge is separate and applies only to select tiers. In the case of Blob endpoint requests over accounts with a flat namespace, the Data Write charge is free for all tiers. The Data Retrieval fee applies to Cool, Cold, and Archive. Like transactions, it's prorated. So if less than a GB is read, then it's just the cost / GB for the per byte cost.

If you really wanted to get down to the cost per byte on that charge, you'd want to make sure the calculation uses GiB instead of GB as the denominator. A GiB is 1,073,741,824 bytes. It would be Data Retrieval fee / 1,073,741,824 for the retrieval fee per byte. See Storage units.

If you still have any question, I would recommened to 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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