Let's suppose I keep adding 5 GB of data every month. I understand that the first month cost will be based on capacity of 5GB and operations performed on that data. But now if next month I add, say 5GB more, would I be charged for a capacity of 10GB or only the new storage (5GB)?
As per my understanding cost of operations (read/write/tier-change) are on the size of data but what confuses me is the storage capacity, if I am billed for the cumulative capacity or just the new storage.
Please suggest and thanks in advance!!
(Note: I am already planning to apply tier level automation on the unused data, above query is out of curiosity and confusion on the billing specs mentioned here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/details/storage/blobs/)
You’re charged for the cumulative space.
Taking your example, for the first month you’ll not be charged anything as you’ve only stored 5GB data.
In the 2nd month you added 5GB more so the total data stored is 10GB. Considering first 5GB is free, you’ll only be charged for 5GB.
UPDATE
To answer your additional questions
So lets suppose the storage for the first month is over the free tier,
say 5TB and 5TB more the next month, now the capacity cost next month
is on 10TB or just the 5TB?
Storage costs are calculated on the total amount of data stored. In this case you will be charged for 10TB as the total amount of data stored in that month is 10TB (5TB from previous month + 5TB in the current month).
if I keep storing 5TB every month, it would be significantly more than
the case where I keep archiving the old 5TB every month, is that so
That is correct. I am assuming that by archiving you mean that you will be moving the data in archive access tier. Please note that you will still be charged for the data that is there in the archive access tier. It's just that you will be charged lesser for the data that's there in that tier but you will be charged as Azure Storage is storing that data for you.
To stop paying for the data storage costs, you will need to delete the data.
Related
As per Microsoft
Estimated charges for the current billing period are updated six times per day.
but it does say how often it calculates the forecast vs actual billing?
Cost & usage data is typically available within 8 ~ 24 hours. And the cost analysis is just a tool to visualize the accumulated data, the interval at which the information are updated might be dependent to several factors as described Here
I saw a blog of Incremental backups on Microsoft Azure Backup: Save on long term storage. (https://azure.microsoft.com/ja-jp/blog/microsoft-azure-backup-save-on-long-term-storage/)
But I have some questions about the Azure Backup Retention rang process works.
As an example, let us take a data source, A, made up of blocks A1, A2, … A10, which needs to be backed up monthly. Block A2, A3, A4, A9 change in the first month, and A5 changes the next month.
When I set the backup retention range of two months, so after I finished the third backup, can I restore block A10? If I can, can you tell me the process? Because as I know, the data source without change had been deleted.
If it not deleted, as the picture shows, there will have two blocks A2 (the first backup and the second backup)? If this is right, the Total Space occupied will continue to increase.
In Azure backup, first backup is always a full backup and the subsequent backups are incremental in nature.
For example:
1st day full backup (100 GB) on premise to Azure = Successful
2nd day only the changes/ churn rate will be backed up as incremental. Could be 10 GB churn rate/changes as compared to previous day. Likewise this will continue till the 7th day. On 8th day as per the retention policy, the first day recovery point gets deleted and the full backup is merged with the 2nd day incremental backup which becomes the oldest recovery point for you to recover your data. For this day if you restore you will get 100 GB data. Because there was no additional data added to the full backup just the changes within 100 GB were backed up as incremental on the 2nd day.
This same logic applies in your use case as well.
Hope this clarifies!
Let me know if this is confusing or you've additional questions for me that I can help with.
I am planning to place some data on Azure Storage, let's say 10 GB. But blobs will be there only for days and will be removed before the invoice comes in. When removed, I will have 0 bytes left in storage.
Is 10 GB going to be billed?
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/storage/
FAQ
If I use Storage for only a few days a month, is the cost prorated?
Yes. 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 utilised 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.
I've searched by can't find anything, but looking at Azure Storage and AWS S3, the rate at which you're billed is based on how much storage is used; most of these measurements are on a per month basis.
Does this mean there is a one time charge for the storage or does is compound?
EG:
Assumption: $1/1Gb
One month I store 30GB of data, the next month I use another 30GB of data. Does that mean that I would pay $30 each month or would I pay $30 the first month and then $60 the next month. The former is $60 total and the latter being $90 total.
Billing is compounded based on the actual storage used.
Let's assume that on the 1st day of your billing cycle in 1st month, you upload 30 GB and then on the 1st day of your billing cycle in 2nd month, you uploaded another 30 GB.
So for 1st month you stored 30 GB thus the price would be $30 for 1st month. In the 2nd month you stored 60 GB (30 GB from 1st month and 30 GB for the 2nd month) so the price for the 2nd month would be $60. So in total you would be paying $90 in two months.
most of these measurements are on a per month basis
Well, yes and no. The rate is a monthly rate, but for object storage services, it's typical for the bill to be calculated hourly.
Assuming 750 (round number) hours in a month, storing 750GB for around 2 hours would be the same price as storing 2GB for the entire month.
You pay for what you use for as long as you use it, prorated against some minimum time granularity, which is typically an hour.
These questions are answered in the various vendors' documentation.
Note that this is true for object storage services, but not block storage services like Elastic Block Store. These services give you a fixed number of GB of storage capacity in disk volumes, and you are billed for the provisioned capacity because it's all there all the time, whether you are using that space or not.
The price calculator Azure does not show option for us we inform the number of hours that we use his service. Is the price calculator Windows Azure calculating 24 hours of use per day during the month?
How can I calculate the amount I pay if I access the Windows Azure services for two hours for day throughout the month?
1. The calculator shows both prices per hour and per month. Yet, the monthly price is estimated on average of (fully consumed) 744 hours per month.
2. You're paying for the resources you consume, not for the resources you accessed. That means that even if nobody visited your website/webrole for the entire month, you would still have to pay the compute cost (the bandwidth cost will be $0 though).