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AZ-305 Practice Question 5: Blob Tiering Lifecycle

Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305) · Test 1 · question 5 of 10

Data Storage Solutionseasy

A research institute writes about 60 TB of instrument output per year into a general-purpose v2 storage account as block blobs. Analysts read a file heavily during its first 30 days and rarely after that. Once a file is more than a year old it is almost never read, but the institute's grant terms require every file to be kept for ten years, and waiting several hours to retrieve one of those old files is acceptable.

Which design stores the data at the lowest cost without requiring custom code?

Select one answer
Show answer and explanation

Answer:

  • A. Apply a blob lifecycle management policy on the container that moves blobs to the cool tier 30 days after creation and to the archive tier 365 days after creation

Lifecycle management is a rule-based policy evaluated by the platform: you declare age-based conditions and it calls Set Blob Tier for you, with no code to write or run. The tier boundaries line up with the access pattern; cool is an online tier intended for data stored at least 30 days, and archive is the cheapest tier of all, intended for data kept at least 180 days and retrieved with hours of latency (rehydration can take up to 15 hours). The stem explicitly says a several-hour wait is acceptable for year-old files, which is what makes archive the correct destination rather than merely a cheaper online tier.

Option B keeps a decade of untouched data at the highest per-gigabyte storage rate. Reserved capacity discounts the rate you are already paying; it cannot come close to the order-of-magnitude difference between hot and archive.

Option C is the most expensive option in the list. Premium Azure Files is SSD-backed storage priced for low-latency file share workloads, and share snapshots are a point-in-time recovery mechanism, not an archival tier. Nothing in the scenario needs SMB access.

Option D reimplements a platform feature badly. It only reaches the cool tier, so it never gets the archive savings; it doubles capacity charges while copies are in flight; and it leaves the institute maintaining a runbook for ten years. Lifecycle management does the same tiering natively.

Reference: Access tiers for blob data

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