Instructor: So while you're in the process

of creating your storage account,

you can choose what the default

access tier is between hot, cool, and cold.

So first of all, what is the access tier?

Well, I'm gonna pull in the pricing page here,

and we can sort of see in this matrix

the difference between them in terms of pricing.

A couple of videos ago, we talked about premium storage

being the most expensive to store per gigabyte

and the cheapest to access per read or write operation.

And this is pricing in terms of 10,000

operations in one unit. And this is pricing in terms of 10,000

operations in one unit.j

So premium really is for when you need

the quickest access to a file

and you're willing to pay a little bit more to store it.

Now, there is actually a way of saving money

using the premium plan over the hot plan,

but that would involve reading the same file

dozens of times per second, seven days a week,

24 hours a day all month.

So it's a pretty, in unlikely circumstance,

you may be better off using a Redis cache

than premium storage in that circumstance.

So if you do really need to access

a file quickly and frequently,

premium storage may be the way to go.

Now, hot storage is what you would normally

consider the default, right?

When you go into the screen, hot is chosen for you.

And the text says, "Optimized for frequently accessed data

and everyday usage scenarios."

So this is sort of a balance between the price of storing

and the price of access.

So we can see it's, in this case,

1.80 cents per gigabyte per month for hot storage.

And additionally, half a cent per 10,000 reads operations,

and 6 cents per 10,000 write operations.

So that is the balance between the price of storage

and the price of access.

Now, if you do not need to have access

to the file as frequently,

what is considered infrequent access,

you may wanna consider cool storage.

It gives the example of infrequently accessed data

and backup scenarios.

Now, cool storage is almost half price

per gigabyte per month.

So you'll see that it's 1.80 cents for hot

and 1 cent for cool.

But in order to pay half the price for storage,

you are going to pay exactly double for access.

So instead of 6.50 cents for 10,000 writes, it's 13 cents.

Instead of half a cent for 10,000 reads, it's 1.30 cents.

So you pay more for access, but it's cheaper to store.

That's why this is good for files

where you don't think you're gonna need

to access it even once per day, right?

The breakeven between the number of accesses

and the pricing per month is probably on the order

of less than one time per hour.

And you're gonna save money in the cool tier.

So maybe you want to consider choosing cool as the default.

Cold is relatively new.

And as you can see, you're actually paying

a way less for storage.

So instead of one cent per gigabyte in the cool tier,

it's one third of a cent per gigabyte in the cold tier.

And as we scroll down to see the data transfer,

once again, it's almost double.

So it goes from 13 cents to 23.40 cents for 10,000 writes,

and from 1.30 cents to 13 cents 10 times for reads.

And for this reason, cold may only be good for things

you really don't offer access at all.

So cold storage is rarely accessed data and backups.

So let's say the scenario

is you did a backup of your server yesterday.

Well, that might be good to be stored in closed storage

because the chances of you needing to restore

from a backup from yesterday are very low.

But you still may wanna keep backups from a month ago,

from three months ago.

You may have a need to keep older backups,

in which case, the chances of being accessed

are extremely low, and you're gonna save lots of money

storing this in cold storage,

around 5% of the cost of hot storage, or 20 times less.

But then you pay more if, in that case of emergency,

you need to access the file.

So that is hot, cool, and cold.

Now, one thing that's not offered

by default is archive storage.

Now, archive storage is very special in which basically,

you cannot access archive storage quickly.

The analogy will be an offline tape.

Back in the '80s, when you used to back up your mainframe,

you would back it up to tape,

and then you would just dismount the tape

from the tape drive, and that was your archive.

So this archive storage, you can move stuff to archive.

You'll see that it's another order of magnitude cheaper,

two tenths of a cent per gigabyte for storage,

but another order of magnitude more expensive,

not for writes, but for reads, you're looking at $6.50

for 10,000 operations as opposed

to only 13 cents or 1.30 cents,

or even half a cent for hot storage.

So this is more than an order of magnitude

more expensive for reads.

And if you are in a hurry,

let's say you use the archive tier, your server crashes,

you need to get access to that file,

then you're gonna pay $65 for high priority read.

So this really is for things that, let's say,

things you need to store for government purposes.

And if you ever do receive a request from the government

to retrieve it, you are going to wait several hours.

So it could be a four hour plus wait to get this back.

So archive storage is for that type of scenario.

You are not locked into hot, cool, cold, or archive

once you've made a selection.

This is just the default.

So you could have mixture of files.

Some of them are hot, some of them are cool or cold,

and even some of them are archived

in the same storage account.

There's no restriction on that.

So if you are sensitive to the cost of storage,

you're looking to save money,

let's say you have a lot of storage

and it's all in the hot tier, and you might think about,

what can I move to cool tier

in order to save almost half the price,

or even to cold tier to save

down to 5% of the original price?

Then consider changing your default

or consider moving your files between these.

It's possible to move them from one to the other.

Part of this course, we'll have a video on lifecycle access,

and we'll talk about automating the movement

from hot to cool, from cool to cold, et cetera.

So that is the decision for access tiers.

I'm just gonna keep this.

I'm gonna set this to cool access,

because the data that I'm using for testing purposes,

I don't mind paying a little bit more for access

because I'm gonna save so much on the storage cost.

Let's move on to talk about networking in the next video.