Azure Storage: Understanding Windows Azure Storage Billing – Bandwidth, Transactions, and Capacity

Follow up this fantastic blog post from the Windows Azure Storage team:

Link: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2010/07/09/understanding-windows-azure-storage-billing-bandwidth-transactions-and-capacity.aspx

We get questions about how to estimate how much Windows Azure Storage will cost in order to understand how to best build a cost effective application. In this post we will give some insight into this question for the three types of storage costs – Bandwidth, Transactions and Capacity.

When using Windows Azure Blobs, Tables and Queues storage costs can consist of:

1. Bandwidth – the amount of data transferred in and out of the location hosting the storage account
2. Transactions – the number of requests performed against your storage account
3. Storage Capacity – the amount of data being stored persistently

Note, the content in this posting is subject to change as we add more features to the storage system. This posting is given as a guideline to allow services to be able to estimate their storage bandwidth, transactions and capacity usage before they go to production with their application.