Optimize Costs by Choosing the Right Blob Storage Access Tier

Quick Answer

Picking the right access tier here means totaling storage cost and access cost together rather than optimizing for storage cost alone, which is the trap this question is set up to catch. Cool and Cold tiers charge less per gigabyte stored but significantly more per read operation, a tradeoff that pays off when data is accessed rarely — but this scenario describes the opposite pattern: small blobs accessed very frequently during a short initial window. Because Hot's higher per-GB storage cost applies for only that short window before the data goes cold and effectively idle, while its low per-operation access cost applies across a high volume of frequent reads during that same window, the total cost comes out lower on Hot than it would on Cool or Cold, where the cheaper storage rate gets overwhelmed by expensive per-read charges multiplied across heavy access. The detail that the blobs are never accessed again after the initial period is what makes this a two-phase problem rather than a simple 'always Hot' or 'always Cool' choice — a lifecycle management policy could later move the data to Cool or Archive once access drops off, but the question here is specifically about the initial upload phase, where access frequency is what should drive the tier choice, not the eventual dormant state.