Model Blob Storage across hot, cool and archive tiers with operation charges and archive rehydration costs.
Blob Storage charges capacity, operations and retrieval on separate meters, and the tiers trade one against the other: archive is roughly 18× cheaper per GiB than hot but its write and read operations cost far more and reading anything at all requires a paid rehydration first. The blended cost per TiB shows what the mix really costs once operations are included. Lifecycle policies that push cold data to archive can backfire when an audit reads it back, so comparing the capacity saving against the rehydration and operation charges is the only way to know whether tiering pays — confirm the current per-GiB and per-operation prices for your region and redundancy in the Azure pricing calculator.
Azure Blob Storage
monthly = Σ(tier GiB × tier price) + (write ops ÷ 10,000 × write price) + (read ops ÷ 10,000 × read price) + rehydrated GiB × retrieval price.
monthly = Σ(tier GiB × tier price) + (write ops ÷ 10,000 × write price) + (read ops ÷ 10,000 × read price) + rehydrated GiB × retrieval price. Blob Storage charges capacity, operations and retrieval on separate meters, and the tiers trade one against the other: archive is roughly 18× cheaper per GiB than hot but its write and read operations cost far more and reading anything at all requires a paid rehydration first. The blended cost per TiB shows what the mix really costs once operations are included.
Lifecycle policies that push cold data to archive can backfire when an audit reads it back, so comparing the capacity saving against the rehydration and operation charges is the only way to know whether tiering pays — confirm the current per-GiB and per-operation prices for your region and redundancy in the Azure pricing calculator.
This calculator takes 12 inputs: Hot tier data, Cool tier data, Archive tier data, Hot price per GiB, Cool price per GiB, Archive price per GiB, Write operations, Write price per 10,000 operations, Read operations, Read price per 10,000 operations, Archive data rehydrated, Rehydration price per GiB. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.