Announcing: Minimum billable object size for cooler storage tiers

Announcing: Minimum billable object size for cooler storage tiers

For storage accounts with Azure Blob or Data Lake Storage (ADLS) we are introducing a minimum billable object size for the cool, cold and archive access tiers of 128KiB. Objects on those tiers that are smaller than 128 KiB will be billed as 128 KiB objects at the rate of the corresponding tier. Billing occurs on the existing capacity billing meters (data stored). There is no change to transactions.

This billing behavior will be introduced in two stages:

July 1, 2026: This new billing behavior applies to all new storage accounts created on or after this date. There is no change for existing storage accounts at this time.

July 1, 2027: This new billing behavior applies to all storage accounts.

The hot access tier continues to have no minimum object size. To reduce potential cost impact, we recommend packaging small objects into larger objects before moving data to cooler tiers, or using Smart Tier (GA) to automatically keep small objects on the hot access tier.

The Blob Capacity metrics are introducing new Blob Types (BlockBlobSmall and Azure Data Lake Storage Small) to support this change.

Public Preview: Azure Site Recovery support for Windows Azure VMs with NVMe disk controllers.
Azure Site Recovery now supports replication and disaster recovery for Windows Azure Virtual Machines running on NVMe-enabled Generation 2 VM families, such as the Da/Ea/Fa v6-series and Ebsv5/Ebdsv5 in the Azure-to-Azure scenario. This enhancement allows customers to enable disaster recovery for their Azure VMs running high performance, I/O-intensive workloads (limited to ASR churn support) with the NVMe disk controller. This capability is supported across all Azure public cloud regions.

Generally Available: Smart Tier (Azure Blob and Data Lake Storage)
Announcing the GA of smart tier for Azure Blob and Data Lake Storage (ADLS). Smart Tier is Generally Available (GA) today in nearly all zonal public cloud regions. (The Azure regions Israel Central, Qatar Central and UAE North are not part of this GA announcement)

Smart tier is a fully managed and automated data tiering solution, avoiding manual tier placement for object storage standard online tiers.

Smart tier automatically moves your data between hot, cool, and cold access tiers based on usage patterns, optimizing your costs for these access tiers automatically. New data is stored in the hot tier. Any object that isn’t accessed for 30 days is moved to the cool tier; after 90 days of inactivity, it transitions to the cold tier. If objects are accessed, they are transitioning back to the hot tier and restart their tiering cycle.

Key Capabilities:

• Seamless Enablement: Activate smart tier at the storage account scope on new and existing general purpose v2 storage accounts with zonal redundancies today.
• Automated Lifecycle: Data movement between tiers is fully automated.
• Simplified Billing Model: Your data uses the existing hot, cool and cold tier capacity prices. There are no charges for tier transitions inside smart tier, early deletion or data retrieval fees. A monitoring fee Is charged for objects stored in smart tier over 128 KiB in size.