AZ-900 Practice Question 27: Archive Access Tier
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) · Test 3 · question 7 of 10
A firm must retain seven years of audit files in Blob Storage at the lowest possible storage cost. The files are almost never read, but a regulator can demand one at any time and the firm is happy to wait several hours for it. Which tier should it use, and what must it accept?
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Answer:
Archive is an offline tier for data that is rarely accessed and has flexible latency requirements "on the order of hours", the audit-file profile precisely, and it carries the lowest storage cost of any tier. The trade-off is the second half of the answer: while a blob is in the archive tier it cannot be read or modified, so to retrieve one you must first rehydrate it to hot, cool, or cold, which can take up to 15 hours. Archive's 180-day minimum retention sits comfortably inside a seven-year policy.
Option A states the cool tier correctly, an online tier for infrequently accessed data, 30-day minimum, cheaper storage and pricier access than hot, but cool is not the *lowest* storage cost, which the stem demands. Option C misstates the cold tier: cold is online with a 90-day minimum; 180 days belongs to archive, which is what makes this the most tempting distractor. Option D describes hot accurately, and that is the trap; hot is simply the most expensive place to park data nobody reads.
Reference: Access tiers for blob data