AZ-900 Practice Question 96: Hot Tier Frequent Access
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) · Test 10 · question 6 of 10
A media company keeps video thumbnails that its website reads dozens of times every day. It wants the access tier with the lowest cost per read and write operation, and it accepts that this tier's per-gigabyte storage cost is the highest of the online tiers. Which access tier fits?
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Answer:
The hot tier is an online tier optimized for data accessed or modified frequently. Microsoft's own comparison states it plainly: hot has "higher storage costs, but lower access and transaction costs" than the cooler tiers. Thumbnails read dozens of times a day are squarely "in active use," which is the hot tier's documented example scenario, and the stem's willingness to pay the highest per-gigabyte price in exchange for the cheapest reads matches hot's cost profile exactly.
Option A describes the cool tier correctly, but cool trades lower storage cost for *higher* access and transaction costs than hot, the opposite of what daily, frequent reads should be optimized for. Option B describes the cold tier accurately as well, but cold pushes access costs even higher than cool and targets data that is rarely touched, not read dozens of times a day. Option C, the archive tier, is offline: a blob there cannot be read at all until it is rehydrated, which can take up to 15 hours, making it unusable for a live website read path regardless of cost.
Reference: Access tiers for blob data