Azure Storage - Detailed Specification

 Storage Life-Cycle Management 

As oppose to earlier days of Azure Storage, Microsoft has brought some degree of parity with its competition with respect to Blob Object Storage. To overcome the lack of options for delegating the importance of data in-conjunction with it acessibility it is with Azure Storage Account offer multiple access tiers.

These tiers are supported for all Azure Storage Account types.

Hot: Hot storage has higher storage costs than cool and archive storage, but the lowest access costs.

Cold: Cool storage tier has lower storage costs and higher access costs compared to hot storage. This tier is intended for data that will remain in the cool tier for at least 30 days.

Archive: Archive storage has the lowest storage cost and higher data retrieval costs compared to hot and cool storage. This tier is intended for data that can tolerate several hours of retrieval latency and will remain in the archive tier for at least 180 days.

A default Hot or Cold tier is set for each storage account. This is the default applied when creating a new blob. This can however be changed. Blobs can also be move into to Archive tier. The movement of Azure Blob can be performed manually or by using the Storage Lifecycle Management will not be used in this phase.