AZ-204 Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure Exam

Understand Azure Blob Storage Tiers

Azure Blob Storage offers four access tiers to help you balance cost and performance. The Hot, Cool, and Cold tiers are online tiers that support immediate data access and vary by storage and transaction costs. The Archive tier is an offline tier for data that you rarely need and can tolerate retrieval delays. Choosing the right tier helps you optimize your cloud spending and meet performance needs.

When picking a tier, consider how often and how quickly you need your data. The Hot tier is ideal for frequently accessed data, with higher storage costs but low read and write fees. The Cool tier suits infrequent access scenarios, offering lower storage costs but higher access charges. The Cold tier lowers storage costs further for rarely changed data, while the Archive tier delivers the lowest storage cost at the expense of higher retrieval fees and latency.

You can move data between tiers either manually or through automation to keep expenses in check over time. Key methods include:

• Set Blob Tier via REST API or PowerShell (Set-AzStorageBlobTier)
• Azure CLI (az storage blob set-tier)
• AzCopy commands
• Client SDKs (for example, .NET’s SetAccessTier method)

To automate these transitions, use lifecycle management policies with rules that trigger actions based on blob age, access patterns, or custom tags. These policies are free to configure, though you pay for Set Blob Tier API calls, and deletions via policy are free. You can track outcomes with LifecyclePolicyCompleted events and review metrics and logs to troubleshoot. Be mindful of early deletion charges if you move data out of the Archive tier before the minimum retention period.

Conclusion

In this section, you learned about the four Azure Blob Storage tiers—Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive—and how they differ in cost and performance. You saw how to choose a tier based on access frequency and retrieval speed, and you explored methods to move data between tiers both manually and automatically. Finally, you discovered how to set up lifecycle management policies to transition or delete blobs over time, helping you keep storage costs optimized. These concepts form the foundation for effective storage policy implementation and data lifecycle management in Azure.