Azure alternative for transactions in storage account - costs

Question

Hello,

I'm contacting you regarding a problem that I encountered lately on my storage account. I saw that on a monthly basis I have a costs which is pretty expensive regarding the transactions for one of my storage accounts especially. Those transactions are not really that important in order to pay let's say a Hot tier as I have right now. My question will be if you can offer me the best choice for storage account for transactions (preferably free) or at the lowest price?
Is there a cheaper alternative for those transactions besides the storage account?

Answer 1

You can take a look at a General Purpose V1 storage account. These have a fixed, low, transaction cost.
To compare a Storage Account in West Europe, using LRS:

General Purpose V1 - €0.0215 per GB and €0.00033 per 10.000 Operations (reads, writes, all the same...)
General Purpose V2 - €0.0176 per GB (Hot) and €0.0039 per 10.000 Read operations
General Purpose V2 - €0.00894 per GB (Cool) and €0.00909 per 10.000 Read operations

But since you indicate that the transactions currently aren't important; who's doing all those transactions and why not get rid of them?

Answer 2

The storage transaction costs vary in price depending on what tier you choose - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/
The cheapest option for storage transactions is to use the Premium tier but the storage cost per GB is higher for the Premium tier so it may work out more expensive overall depending on how much data you have.

You can use the Azure pricing calculator to compare the different options and see which works out best for you - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/

Answer 3

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

Adding more information to the above response! GPV1 is the best option for your scenario. However I recommended to use GPV2 based on the features, options, availability in GPV2
If you still find any difficulties, I would recommended 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 free, and it's the best choice for you.

Let me explain how transaction is billed This is bit old article but explains how transaction is charged with detailed information Understanding Windows Azure Storage Billing – Transactions

Storage account billing
Azure Storage bills based on your storage account usage. All objects in a storage account are billed together as a group. Storage costs are calculated according to the following factors:

• Region refers to the geographical region in which your account is based.
• Account type refers to the type of storage account you're using.
• Access tier refers to the data usage pattern you've specified for your general-purpose v2 or Blob storage account.
• Capacity refers to how much of your storage account allotment you're using to store data.
• Redundancy determines how many copies of your data are maintained at one time, and in what locations.
• Transactions refer to all read and write operations to Azure Storage.
• Data egress refers to any data transferred out of an Azure region. When the data in your storage account is accessed by an application that isn't running in the same region, you're charged for data egress. For information about using resource groups to group your data and services in the same region to limit egress charges, see What is an Azure resource group?.

The Azure Storage pricing page provides detailed pricing information based on account type, storage capacity, replication, and transactions. The Data Transfers pricing details provides detailed pricing information for data egress. You can use the Azure Storage pricing calculator to help estimate your costs.

To learn more, see the QuickStart on analyzing your costs.

Your Blob storage consumption, in gigabytes, including: How much data is being stored in the storage account? How does the data volume change on a monthly basis; does new data constantly replace old data?

The primary access pattern for your Blob storage data, including: How much data is being read from and written to the storage account?
How many read operations versus write operations occur on the data in the storage account? To decide on the best access tier for your needs, it can be helpful to determine your blob data capacity, and how that data is being used. This can be best done by looking at the monitoring metrics for your account.

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

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