Storage Costs Mount With Customer Choices for Azure SQL PaaS

Storage costs can grow quickly and outpace compute costs depending on customer selections for Azure SQL PaaS offerings. Shown here are four deployment scenarios for Azure SQL Managed Instance (all are based on the service’s General purpose purchase tier). The four scenarios demonstrate that choosing higher levels of redundancy (typically to address disaster recovery and archiving needs) can make storage costs substantially higher than compute costs.

The scenarios include the following:

• Top left: No backup or long-term retention is purchased
• Top right: Backup storage equivalent to the amount of primary storage is purchased, and the locally redundant storage (LRS) redundancy option is selected for the backup. No long-term retention is purchased
• Bottom left: Backup storage equivalent to the amount of primary storage is purchased, and the read-access geo-zone-redundant storage (RA-GZS) redundancy option is selected for the backup. No long-term retention is purchased
• Bottom right: Backup storage