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I want to use Azure Blob storage as a "temporary" storage location for a project I'm working on. By "temporary", I mean that data will be stored in Azure Blobs but only for short periods of time, definitely far less than a month. Here are a few example scenarios:

  1. Upload 50GB of data to some blobs. One hour later, download that 50GB and delete the blobs.
  2. Upload 100GB of data to some blobs, and immediately download it on another host and delete the blobs. (The time difference here is determined only by the bandwidth in/out of Azure)
  3. Upload 25GB of data to some blobs. One day later, delete the blob without retrieving it at all, but upload a new 25GB dataset that day.

All of Azure's blob storage billing details state billing is "GB per month". But then another page I found mentions that if you're storing blobs for less than one month, you can "estimate" costs by calculating per-day costs. This suggests that blob storage billing is done on a per-day granularity. If that's true, then scenario 3 above can be easily calculated - I'd be billed the price of 25GB for one month, divided by the number of days in that month. If scenario 3 continued continuously I'd be billed for 25GB at the GB/month rate each month.

However that doesn't answer what would happen in scenarios 1 and 2. Imagine scenarios 1 and 2 might happen multiple times per day. Suppose scenario 1 happens 10 times in one day. In that instance, I have actually moved 500GB in and out of Azure blobs. But at the end of the day, there is 0GB of data being used. Do I get billed for 50GB (the maximum I occupied) for one day, or 500GB for one day, or 50GB for a longer period of time? Suppose two operations are running in parallel 5 times a day, so I'm using a maximum of 100GB of storage at one specific time, but again, one hour later all 100GB is deleted.

fdmillion
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1 Answers1

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Billing happens every hour. We prorate usage and send it to billing.

Let say, at hour 0 if the capacity is 50GB, we will send 50/(number of hours in the month) to billing.

Additional information: If I use Azure Storage for only a few days a month, is the cost prorated?

Storage capacity is billed in units of the average daily amount of data stored, in gigabytes (GB), over a monthly period. For example, if you consistently used 10 GB of storage for the first half of the month, and none for the second half of the month, you would be billed for your average usage of 5 GB of storage.

This article helps you plan and manage costs for Azure Blob Storage. First, estimate costs by using the Azure pricing calculator.

Azure Blob Storage pricing

I would recommend you to, please reach out to Azure Billing team. Billing team would be the best to provide more insight and guidance on this scenario(based on your region and requirement), they provide free support
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/options/

SumanthMarigowda-MSFT
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  • Interesting. So if it bills per hour, that means in theory you could never be billed for data that is stored for less than one hour? See scenario 2 in my original post. This might not be the "expected use" of blobs, but for the experiment I'm doing, it's easier to send data to blobs then signal another server to pull/delete it rather than deal with a VPN or some other mechanism to directly connect the two VMs. Not saying I want to pay nothing, I'm happy to pay a monthly average based on average usage, so just wanna make sure I'm not gonna see any surprises. Thanks! – fdmillion Nov 10 '22 at 04:57