Hey, Cloud Gurus.
Welcome to this lesson on archiving data,
and specifically accomplishing that with Azure Blob storage.
In the next few minutes, we're going to talk a little bit
about access tiers.
We're going to look at the tier breakdown,
some considerations when choosing tiers,
and wrap it up with a review.
So let's get started.
There are 3 access tiers available to you
in Azure Blob storage.
The first is Hot,
and this is optimized for frequently accessed data.
This is what your storage account will be set to by default
because it assumes that you're working with day-to-day data.
From there we have Cool,
which is optimized for infrequently accessed data
that's stored for at least a month.
And finally, Archive,
which is optimized for data that is rarely accessed.
If we break these down a little bit starting with Hot,
we have no minimum time there
because like I said, this is your day-to-day data.
This is where you're operating on a continual basis.
Storage costs here are the highest,
but it's access costs are the lowest of the three,
and it's used for active or staging data.
Stepping down from there, we have Cool,
and that has a minimum time of 30 days.
There is an early deletion penalty
if you take it out before that 30 days,
but we'll get more to that in a moment.
It's storage cost is lower compared to the Hot
and it's access cost is higher compared to Hot storage.
And so it falls in the middle between Hot and Archive.
It's going to be about half the storage cost
compared to the Hot tier,
and about twice the read/write access cost compared to Hot.
And so its wheelhouse is really short-term data,
making it great for short-term backup and recovery.
Finally, we have Archive,
which has a minimum time of 180 days.
It's storage cost is extremely cheap compared to the others,
but it's access cost is the highest.
It becomes very expensive to move or delete data
in this tier,
because it's meant to be left there for a long time,
making it great for long-term backup
or compliance and regulatory purposes.
There are some considerations for working with these tiers.
One, you can set Hot and Cool access tiers
at the account level,
but Archive has to be set at the blob level.
Two, there is some lower availability
associated with the Cool access tier compared to Hot.
And that's the trade-off you get
for having a lower storage cost.
As mentioned before, there is an early deletion penalty
if you have blobs in the Cool or Archive access tiers
and move or delete them before the minimum time.
You will incur an early deletion fee.
Archive data is stored offline,
and so it is not as simple to move data within that tier
back and forth between the other tiers.
In order to retrieve it, it has to be rehydrated.
And you can think about this
kind of like your blobs being zipped and stored offline.
It's going to take a long amount of time
to bring it back online on a different tier.
Your redundancy options are a little bit different
with the Archive tier only supporting LRS, GRS, and RA-GRS,
but Hot and Cool have access to all of the options.
And you need to keep in mind, storage limits.
Data storage limits are set at the account level,
not per access tier.
So you can put everything in one access tier if you want,
or spread them across all three.
It's all using the same limit of your storage account.
From here, let's jump over to the Azure portal
and take a look at setting these access tiers.
Here we are in the Azure portal,
and I'm simply using the Cloud Playground
included with A Cloud Guru subscriptions.
We have a number of containers here,
one for a landing zone,
a curated zone, and a production zone.
If we open up this landing zone folder,
there is a testdata.json blob here,
and you can see that the access tier is Hot,
and that is inferred from the account level,
which we'll take a look at in a moment.
But if we wanted to change that level for this blob,
we can click our 3 dots over here
and come to Change Tier.
From there, we can change it from Hot to Cool or Archive.
And remember, you can only change it to Archive
at this level.
You can't do that at the account level.
So let's change it to Cool and click Save.
And it's just that easy.
You can change those back and forth as you want,
but keep in mind the early deletion penalties
if you move it out of the Cool or Archive tiers
before those minimum time limits.
Let's pop back out to our list of containers.
And if we come down in this left column to Configuration,
and this is the configuration of our storage account.
We click on that.
Here you can see our default blob access tier.
And now you can understand
why it said that Hot was inferred.
That is the default level that is set on our account.
And so you can choose either Cool or Hot,
and as mentioned, you cannot choose Archive from here.
And by way of review,
Hot access tier is for frequently used data.
Cool access tier is for infrequently used data
that will be stored at least 30 days.
And Archive access tier is for long-term storage
of 180 days or more.
Thank you for joining me for this lesson
around archiving data in Azure Blob storage.
when you're ready I'll see you in the next video.