Azure Files provisioned v2 billing model for flexibility, cost savings, and predictability

We are excited to announce the general availability of the Azure Files provisioned v2 billing model for the HDD (standard) media tier. Provisioned v2 offers a provisioned billing model, meaning that you pay for what you provision, which enables you to flexibly provision storage, IOPS, and throughput. This allows you to migrate your general-purpose workloads to Azure at the best price and performance, but without sacrificing price predictability. With provisioned v2, you have granular control to scale your file share alongside your workload needs – whether you are connecting from a remote client, in hybrid mode with Azure File Sync, or running an application in Azure. 

The provisioned v2 model enables you to dynamically scale up or down your application’s performance as needed, without downtime. Provisioned v2 file shares can span from 32 GiB to 256 TiB in size, with up to 50,000 IOPS and 5 GiB/sec throughput, providing the flexibility to handle both small and large workloads. 

If you’re an existing user of Azure Files, you may be familiar with the current “pay-as-you-go” model for the HDD (standard) media tier. While conceptually, this model is simple – you pay for the storage and transactions used – usage-based pricing can be incredibly challenging to understand and use because it’s very difficult or impossible to accurately predict the usage on a file share. Without knowing how much usage you will drive, especially in terms of transactions, you can’t make accurate predictions about your Azure Files bill ahead of time, making planning and budgeting difficult. The provisioned v2 model solves all these problems – and more! 

Increased scale and performance 

In addition to the usability improvements of a provisioned model, we have significantly increased the limits over the current “pay-as-you-go” model:  

The larger limits offered on the HDD media tier in the provisioned v2 model mean that as your storage requirements grow, your file share can keep pace without the need to resort to unnatural workarounds such as sharding, allowing you to keep your data in logical file shares that make sense for your organization. 

Per share monitoring 

Since provisioning decisions are made on the file share level, in the provisioned v2 model, we’ve brought the granularity of monitoring down to the file share level. This is a significant improvement over pay-as-you-go file shares, which can only be monitored at the storage account level. To help you monitor the usage of storage, IOPS, and throughput against the provisioned limits of the file share, we’ve added the following new metrics: 

• Transactions by Max IOPS, which provides the maximum IOPS used over the indicated time granularity. 

• Bandwidth by Max MiB/sec, which provides the maximum throughput in MiB/sec used over the indicated time granularity. 

• File Share Provisioned IOPS, which tracks the provisioned IOPS of the share on an hourly basis. 

• File Share Provisioned Bandwidth MiB/s, which tracks the provisioned throughput of the share on an hourly basis. 

• Burst Credits for IOPS, which helps you track your IOPS usage against bursting. 

To use the metrics, navigate to the specific file share in the Portal, and select “Monitoring > Metrics”. Select the metric you want, in this case, “Transactions by Max IOPS”, and ensure that the usage is filtered to the specific file share you want to examine. 

How to get access to the provisioned v2 billing model? 

The provisioned v2 model is generally available now, at the time of writing, in a limited set of regions. When you create a storage account in a region that has been enabled for provisioned v2, you can create a provisioned v2 account by selecting “Standard” for Performance, and “Provisioned v2” for File share billing. See how to create a file share for more information. 

When creating a share in a provisioned v2 storage account, you can specify the capacity and use the recommended performance. The recommendations we provide for IOPS and throughput are based on common usage patterns. If you know your workloads performance needs, you can manually set the IOPS and throughput to further tune your share.  

As you use your share, you may find that your usage pattern changes or that your usage is more or less active than your initial provisioning. You can always increase your storage, IOPS and throughput provisioning to right size for growth and you can also decrease any provisioned quantity after 24 hours have elapsed since your last increase. Storage, IOPS, and throughput changes are effective within a few minutes after a provisioning change. 

In addition to your baseline provisioned IOPS, we provide credit-based IOPS bursting that enables you to burst up to 3X the amount of provisioned IOPS for up to 1 hour, or as long as credits remain. To learn more about credit-based IOPS bursting, see provisioned v2 bursting. 

Pricing example 

To see the new provisioned v2 model in action, let’s compare the costs of the pay-as-you-go model versus the provisioned v2 model for the following Azure File Sync deployment: 

• Storage: 50 used TiB
• For the pay as we go model, we need usage as expressed in the total number of “transaction buckets” for the month: 
  • Write: 3,214 
  • List: 7,706 
  • Read: 7,242 
  • Other: 90
• For the provisioned v2 model, we need usage as expressed as the maximum IOPS and throughput (in MiB / sec) hit over the course of an average time period to guide our provisioning decision: 
  • Maximum IOPS: 2,100 IOPS 
  • Maximum throughput: 85 MiB / sec 

To deploy a file share using the pay-as-you-go model, you need to pick an access tier to store the data in between transaction optimized, hot, and cool. The correct access tier to pick depends on the activity level of your data: a really active share should pick transaction optimized, while a comparatively inactive share should pick cool. Based on the activity level of this share as described above, cool is the best choice. 

When you deploy the share, you need to provision more than you use today to ensure the share can support your application as your data continues to grow. Ultimately this how much to provision is up to you, but a good rule of thumb is to start with 2X more than what you use today. There’s no need to keep your share at a consistent provisioned to used ratio.  

Now we have all the necessary inputs to compare cost: 

In this example, the pay-as-you-go file share costs $0.0348 / used GiB while the provisioned v2 file share costs $0.0181 / used GiB, a ~2X cost improvement for provisioned v2 over pay-as-you-go. Shares with different levels of activity will have different results – your mileage may vary. 

Typically, when deploying a file share for the first time, you would not know what the transaction usage would be, making cost projections for the pay-as-you-go model quite difficult. But it would still be straightforward to compute the provisioned v2 costs. If you don’t know specifically what your IOPS and throughput utilization would be, you can use the built-in recommendations as a starting point. 

Resources 

Here are some additional resources on how to get started: 

• Azure Files pricing page 

• Understanding the Azure Files provisioned v2 model | Microsoft Docs 

• How to create an Azure file share | Microsoft Docs (follow the steps for creating a provisioned v2 storage account/file share)