What's the Azure bandwidth pricing?

Question

I'm a bit confused by Azure price calculator. In particular it doesn't explain the bandwidth pricing.

I'm considering Azure for a restful api that is going to use blobs for most data storage together with a sql server database for a subset that is easier to manage with a relational approach.

In this application a lot of data will enter the system through the ReST api, but a small fraction will be exposed to the clients (mainly as summary reports). Still the total bandwidth required should be in the order of 50 GiB/mo.

In the Azure's pricing page related to data transfer I see the pricing is only related to outgoing data, but I cannot figure how this relates to a ReST api that will be hosted in Azure App Service.
I mean, it could just mean that I'm going to pay for the bandwidth consumed by HTTPS responses (and not by HTTPS requests), but it seems a bit hard to estimate what this pricing is going to be.

Answer 1

Within a given region, there are no transfer costs at all. You mentioned using App Service, blobs, and SQL Database. As long as those services are within a single region, there are zero bandwidth costs as data flows between them and any other service within that region.

Bandwidth is billed specifically for outbound transfer. So, essentially you're metered for all data leaving a given region.

Answer 2

inbound traffic is free so the data coming in can be removed from the equation. Outbound is not free, and you saw the pricing page.

Data transfer is everything that is going out from every operation you execute. And it is hard to estimate the traffic pricing - i would recommend to register the Azure trial and test it for a month and see how it is going. Because your data is not only what is returned, there is a lot of payloads coming with that.

But if you estimate 10 GB/month of outbound traffic, then it will start from $0.087 per GB starting from fifth GB (because first 5 are free). There are different regions described at the pricing page as well, so you should apply the pricing according to the region where your website is.

Answer 3

If you look at the page Data Transfers Pricing Details

Data Transfers refer to data moving in and out of Azure data centres other than those explicitly covered by the Content Delivery Network or ExpressRoute pricing.

Inbound data transfers

(i.e. data going into Azure data centres): Free

Outbound data transfer prices are set at a sliding scale depending on location and bandwidth used.