Azure Blob Storage

Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft cloud object storage: a file warehouse billed by capacity plus operations. Its value is not storing files but three things that are hard to combine elsewhere — spreading data across four tiers whose costs differ several-fold, locking audit logs into an undeletable state through an immutability (WORM) policy, and sinking old data automatically with lifecycle rules. Below: tiers, billing, redundancy, region and provisioning, with the official live quote as the reference for price.

Specs & pricing

What Blob Storage actually solves for an enterprise

Enterprises use object storage for three reasons. First, volume unstructured data — backups, recordings, logs, the raw layer of a data lake. Second, compliance retention: financial, medical and public-sector records must stay traceable and untampered, and a policy lock protects the container against even the account owner. Third, cost tiering: the last 7 days and the last 5 years differ in price by a multiple.

• Immutability policy and Legal Hold — container-level lock, undeletable until the date passes
• Soft delete and versioning — recover an accidental overwrite; on by default for new accounts
• Native SFTP endpoint — upload without standing up an FTP server, good for legacy systems
• ADLS Gen2 namespace — mount as HDFS paths so Spark reads and writes directly

Splitting across four tiers: capacity, retrieval latency and minimum retention

How Blob is billed: capacity, transactions and egress are three meters

• Capacity — tier rate times actual capacity, falling as data sinks
• Transactions — per 10,000 operations; many small hot files can exceed the capacity charge
• Egress — per GB for internet and cross-region traffic. Same-region Azure traffic is not charged
• Retrieval — rehydrating from Archive is billed separately; demotion generally is not
• Levers — lifecycle rules plus a CDN in front

Region and redundancy: choosing between LRS, ZRS and GRS

Storing in Azure Hong Kong (East Asia) and serving Asia-Pacific

With data in Hong Kong East Asia, reads from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia usually land in the 20–40ms band; Singapore around 30–50ms, Tokyo and Seoul 50–70ms. Two effects: egress rates are tiered by region, and compliance logs should use cross-region redundancy with the replica in a region your regulator accepts.

Azure Blob versus S3, OSS and GCS

Opening and settling Blob billing through us

1. Tell us your data volume, access pattern and residency requirement (for example "2TB of logs monthly, keep 5 years")
2. We handle the official Azure subscription registration, company entity and payment verification, and provision the account
3. You create the storage account in the portal. Check the region field carefully — it cannot be changed after creation
4. Configure lifecycle rules to sink old data first, then apply an immutability policy to retained containers
5. Settle by USDT, other crypto or bank transfer, with no personal credit card and no personal identity documents

Why Blob bills run over budget

• Counting capacity but not transactions — many small hot files, transaction cost can exceed capacity cost
• Forgetting minimum retention — deleting shortly after archiving triggers the early-deletion fee
• No lifecycle rules — old data still in the Hot tier, paying the highest rate
• Ignoring cross-region reads — app and storage in different regions bill every read as egress
• Production container left unlocked — a retention requirement with mutable logs