Microsoft recently announced general availability of the Archive tier available in blob storage. Although, It should be noted that currently this does not appear to be across all regions, with the following regions listed as available – North Central US, South Central US, East US, West US, East US 2, Central US, West US 2, West Central US, North Europe, West Europe, Korea Central, Korea South, Central India, and South India.

Azure currently provides 3 tiers for blob storage. Hot storage tier is for frequently accessed data that requires fast access performance. The cool storage tier is for storing data that is infrequently accessed and stored for at least 30 days. The Azure archive tier is the new offering for storing data that is rarely accessed and stored for at least 180 days. Archive storage is designed for storage of data that it is acceptable that retrieval of the data that can tolerate several hours of latency as Archive tier storage is offline data.

One of the important things to know is that Archive tiering is that it is not set at the storage account level, and can only be set at the object level.

In the below diagram, you can see that Access Tier for the account only allows for the selection of Hot or Cool.

Another important consideration is that not all storage accounts support Object Level access tiering. Only Blob Storage or General Purpose v2 (GPv2) accounts. General Purpose v1 (GPv1) accounts do not support tiering.

If you have the right storage account type, then you will be able to set the access tiering on an object within a container.

Just remember that when the objectis converted to archive tier it is not available until it has been re-hydrated back to Hot or Cool storage, and this may take several hours!