Azure cloudapp storage

Question

I have a very unique question. In azure when you look at the pricing calculator and your deciding which size of VM to deploy for your cloud service the pricing calculator at the following URL

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?scenario=cloud

shows storage along with the the size of the VM. For example the extra small instance says "Extra small VM (1GHz CPU, 768MB RAM, 20GB Storage)" while the large instance shows "Large VM (4 x 1.6GHz CPU, 7GB RAM, 1,000GB Storage)".

My question is this. If I link a storage account to this cloud service do I get the listed storage in my storage account included with my payment for the cloud service. EG. I have a Large instance with a linked storage account and in the storage account I have 500GB of data stored. Do I pay 251.06 for the cloud service and an additional $36.91 for the 500 gb or is the storage free because it is under the 1000 gb limit listed as included storage for the cloud service?

Answer 1

Your question not unique, but rather common. The answer is - you pay for VM once and for Cloud Storage - second time. The point is that if you do Cloud Service (Web and Worker Roles) the storage that comes with the VM is NOT persistent storage. This means that the VM storage (the one that is from 20GB to 2TB depending ot VM size) can go away at any point of time. While the Cloud Storage (the cloud storage account - BLob / Tables / Queues) is absolutely durable, secure, persistent and optionally even geo-replicated.