Azure storage has so many offerings that it is hard to select one offering. The good news is that in many cases you can change configurations to match an elastic response to a cloud resource.

I was recently talking to none other than Dave Kawula about a scenario where a massive amount of Azure blob storage data had to be retrieved. The retrieval was not an evacuation of Azure, but more of a data repopulation situation.

Azure cool and hot tier storage have different characteristics. Right in the Azure portal, it states:

The account Access Tier is the default tier that is inferred by any blob without an explicitly set tier. The Hot Access Tier is ideal for frequently accessed data, and the Cool Access Tier is ideal for infrequently accessed data. The Archive Access Tier can only be set at the blob level and not on the account.

In addition to cool and hot, there is archive (which is a different use case). You can read the whole doc on the Azure tiers here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blob-storage-tiers?tabs=azure-portal

There are scenarios where it makes sense to give the Azure storage a performance boost associated with Azure hot tier. It does impact pricing, however if you know of a spike in the read or egress of this storage it is an easy change to make.

To promote the storage, you simply go to the configuration of the storage account. Let’s make this change on my vscrwv0dev0vbablob storage account. By the way, do you like that storage account name? See my post on nomenclature. Here is where you configure the new tier:

The change is confirmed with a note that you will incur different pricing, which is a good thing to check before you make the change. Just click save on the top control and your storage account is now running on the new tier.

The best part about Azure storage here is that if at some point later on, you want to change the tier back down to cool tier; you can do that in the same manner. This is a great flexibility so you are not “locked in” to only go up in the consumption. Perfect for situations where you need the performance burst on the access to Azure storage.

This configuration change applies to the whole storage account, which in my example is using only blobs. If files shares, tables, etc were used they would be changed as well. You can get into some specific tiers for specific blobs if you wish via PowerShell also.