James Serra talks about a new tier of blob storage:
Last year Microsoft introduced Azure Cool Blob storage, which cost customers a penny per GB per month in some Azure regions. Now, users have another, lower-cost option in Azure Archive Blob Storage, along with new Blob-Level Tiering data lifecycle management capabilities. So there are now three Azure blog storage tiers: Hot, Cool, and Archive.
Azure Archive Blob Storage costs 0.18 cents per GB per month when the service is delivered through its cloud data center in the East US 2 (for comparison, in the same region hot is 1.8 cents and cool is 1.0 cents per GB per month) . Customers can expect a 99 percent availability SLA (service level agreement) when the service makes its way out of the preview stage.
This is Azure’s response to AWS Glacier. The immediate sticker price is a bit higher, but if there aren’t any incremental costs associated with deletion, uploading, or retrieving files, then it could end up matching Glacier in TCO.