AZ-900 Practice Question 30: Data Transfer Costs
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) · Test 3 · question 10 of 10
A company uploads 5 TB of archive data from an on-premises server into Azure Blob Storage, and months later restores 200 GB of it back to that server. Which of those transfers attracts an Azure bandwidth charge?
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Answer:
Direction, not volume, decides this. Some inbound data transfers, data going *into* Azure datacenters, are free, while outbound data transfers are priced by zone. A *billing zone* is a geographical grouping of Azure regions used specifically for data-transfer pricing, and it is not the same thing as an availability zone; moving data within Europe costs less than moving it from Europe to Asia. Geography is one of the six documented factors that affect Azure cost, alongside resource type, consumption, maintenance, subscription type, and Azure Marketplace purchases.
Option B is the intuition most people arrive with, and it is exactly what the free-ingress rule contradicts. Option C reverses the rule; the 5 TB is the bigger number but it is travelling in the free direction. Option D is wrong on both counts; outbound bandwidth is billed per gigabyte on top of stored capacity, and accounts configured for geo-replication incur a separate per-gigabyte geo-replication data transfer charge as well.