I love Azure. And I've always loved the notion of pay for what you use. Makes sense. Although, lately, it seems I am paying for a lot more. I'll need to investigate that for another day.
The subject today is Storage. Azure is in an ever-releasing-and-improving frame of mind. There i snow a v2 of storage. It has cool features like, hot, cold, archive settings and nothing else. Yet when you read something like, from Azure's sales page:
For new customers, we generally recommend General Purpose v2 for access to the latest storage features, including Tiered Storage and Archive. We recommend General Purpose v1 and Blob Storage accounts only for customers with prior experience with those accounts, but these customers may also benefit from using GPv2. Learn more about the benefits of different storage account types.
You gotta be like "yeah! I'll take that!" I usually go with the latest version of everything. Why would this be different.
And then I came across the pricing. The rest of this post assumes that you're not going to be using archive as your storage method. Archive allows you to store data for much cheaper. If you are looking at archive rates, which at this time are .002 then this advice does not apply.
The pricing is diffewrent for V1 and V2 for both storage and writes. The marketing brochure says that v2 offers cheaper storage rates and higher transaction rates. Some quick math using calc.exe shows me that I was about to make a mistake.
The following are the rates and total monthly price for each to store 50GBs.
| Hot | Cold | |
| V2 | .0208 / $1.04 | .0152 / $.76 |
| V1 | .024 / $1.20 | |
I guess if you're into petabytes that can add up. But here are the writes and reads at 10K each. I'm only going to list HOT which is significantly cheaper than hot.
| Read | Write | List | |
| V2 | .004 | .05 | .05 |
| V1 | All operations | $.00036 |
Yikes. Knowing that there will be a situation where storing under archive and cold is the way to go. I get that. But, if you're going to be accessing your data with regularity, this can get expensive much faster. You're talking about a read rate of .004 vs. .00036 <= that's an extra zero. That's 7 cents for 2M reads vs $.80.
- So, before you pick v1 or v2 - make sure you know the following:
- How much are you storing
- How often are you accessing some or all of that data
- Can you move some data into cold or archive BECAUSE YOU RARELY access it
- How many reads are you performing monthly
- How many write are you performing monthly
So, get those numbers together and head over the the calculator for some estimating:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?service=storage#storage512467b4-8311-4114-83ab-24ebcd33a500