Seven years of audit logs must be retained. They are read perhaps once a year during an investigation, and waiting several hours to get them back is acceptable. The lowest storage cost wins. Which access tier fits?
Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900), objective architecture-and-services. Azure architecture and services medium
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The options
Correct The archive tier
Correct. Archive is offline storage at the lowest storage price, and reading a blob from it requires rehydration to an online tier first, which takes hours — a trade this requirement explicitly permits.
Not correct The hot tier
Wrong direction. Hot has the highest storage price and the lowest access price, which suits data read often. Here it means paying every month for instant access to something nobody reads.
Not correct The cool tier
Wrong, though closer. Cool suits data that is accessed infrequently but still online and still expected within milliseconds. Once a year, with hours to spare, is further down the scale than cool.
Not correct A premium block blob account
Wrong, and the opposite of the requirement. Premium buys consistently low latency and high transaction rates at the highest price, for workloads where milliseconds matter.
Why
The tiers trade storage price against access price and access speed, so pick by two questions: how often is it read, and how long can you wait. Hot, cool and cold are online tiers with progressively cheaper storage, dearer access and longer minimum retention periods; archive is offline and needs rehydration measured in hours. Watch the minimum retention: deleting or moving data early incurs an early-deletion charge that can undo the saving.
Where this comes from
- Cited
- Microsoft AZ-900 study guide skill area architecture-and-services.storage
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