Saving $ by reserving Azure Blob Storage

What is Azure Blob Storage?

Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft’s object storage solution for the cloud.

It allows users to store large amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data.

Blob Storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of this type of data and can also be used to create data lakes for analytics needs.

How do we save?

There are a number of ways to optimize Azure Blob Storage costs, but this time we’ll look at saving by purchasing Azure Blob Storage reservations (rate reduction):

Azure Storage reservations are applied against the reservations’ specific Access tier, Redundancy and Region:

The discounts are as follows:

Archive tier (LRS/GRS/RA-GRS):
– Archive 100 TB One Year – 11%
– Archive 1 PB One Year – 15%
– Archive 100 TB Three Years – 18%
– Archive 1 PB Three Years – 22%

Cool tier (LRS/ZRS/GRS/RA-GRS/GZRS/RA-ZGRS):
– Cool 100 TB One Year – 18%
– Cool 1 PB One Year – 22%
– Cool 100 TB Three Years – 26%
– Cool 1 PB Three Years – 30%

Hot tier (LRS/ZRS/GRS/RA-GRS/GZRS/RA-ZGRS):
– Hot 100 TB One Year – 10%
– Hot 1 PB One Year – 15%
– Hot 100 TB Three Years – 28%
– Hot 1 PB Three Years – 32%

Also note that Azure Storage reserved capacity is not available for:

– Premium storage accounts
– General-purpose v1 (GPv1) storage accounts
– Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1
– Page blobs
– Azure Queue storage
– Azure Table storage

I think it’s well worth looking into reserving Azure Blob Storage (if you consume a lot of it), the 100 TB Three Year option looks pretty interesting to me!