Cost management question Azure Disk storage cost

Question

I am new to Azure Disk storage management Is Azure Disk the same as the Azure Blob has the cold, hot option? Also because I have so many virtual machines, every virtual machine has attached a disk like Ultra disk Premium SSD v2 Premium SSD Standard SSD Standard HDD. Imagine you have 100 vm and some attach ultra disk and premium disk, you will be poor because it cost you tremendous amount of money.

So my question is how do you save money for disk? If you are doing load performance testing the disk will receive 800 GB data every day. How do you lower the cost for storage,

does disk has the autoshutdown or autostart functionality to save money? because I heard disk cost is counting per hour. So i want to shutdown it in the evening when I sleep to save money.

How does the disk cost ? for example, if a disk is 10GB disk and 100 dollar per month. If you ingest 20 GB in that 10gb disk, will you be charged over expensively,

if you don't use that disk or just use the disk for very small amount like 0.1GB..WILL IT STILL CHARGE YOU 100 dollar per month? or it charge you 0.1*100 since you only use 0.1 amount of space.

I feel charge by hour maybe not a good choice. Does Azure have something like you use 0.1GB charge you 0.1GB dollar rather than 10GB dollar per month>? thanks

Answer 1

Firstly, Let me explain the difference between Disk and Storage account.

Azure Disk: Block-level storage volumes for Azure VMs. A data disk is always attached to a VM. You can't access the data on the data disk directly from internet. For the VM OS the data disk is attached to the VM and can be used by the OS and services like a "local disk" in your computer.

Azure Blobs: A massively scalable object store for text and binary data. Also includes support for big data analytics through Data Lake Storage Gen2. A Storage Account is a "serverless storage" to store data. You are able to access the data without running a VM from internet and/or VMs in Azure. A Storage account (fileshare or blob storage for example) can be used by a VM like a "network share"

Refer to this article for Hot, cool, and archive access tiers for blob data which provide detailed information Access trier, pricing, billing and more

• Pricing calculator: Calculate your estimated hourly or monthly costs for using Azure. The Azure Pricing Calculator can help you understand the costs of moving workloads to the Azure cloud. It estimates Azure pricing once all your data and applications are in Azure.

Managed Disks pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/managed-disks/

To reduce the Disks and cost optimization

The prices shown are the monthly prices. How do I get charged if I use disks for less than a month? The charges will be pro-rated on an hourly basis using the monthly price. For instance, Premium SSD for P15 is $34.56 (price may vary per region). For October, you will be billed per $34.56/(31 days x 24 hours) = $0.047/hour

How do I calculate pricing for Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage? The total cost of Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage depends on the size and number of disks you provision, and their respective configurations in terms of provisioned IOPS and throughput.

For example, if you have an application that requires three different disks with the following characteristics:

Disk 1 - 64 GiBs, 2,000 IOPS and 120 MB/s of throughput Disk 2 - 256 GiBs, 4,000 IOPS and 100 MB/s of throughput Disk 3 - 1,024 GiBs, 15,000 IOPS and 1,200 MB/s of throughput The monthly cost for each Premium SSD v2 Disk, in a Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) configuration, in the East US region will be:

Disk 1 monthly cost = 64*$0.081 = $5.14/month Disk 2 monthly cost = 256*$0.081 + (4,000-3,000) * $0.0052 = $25.67/month Disk 3 monthly cost = 1,024*$0.081 + (15,000-3,000) * $0.0052 + (1,200 – 125) * $0.041 = $186.71/month Prices are subject to change depending on the region you choose.

If you still have any question on Azure pricing I would recommended to contact Billing and Subscription team would be the best to provide more insight and guidance on this scenario: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/options/ it's a free support

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.