Cold Storage, Hot Savings 🧊 Automate Azure Blob Tiering with Terraform and Cut Storage Costs by 70%

Your Hot tier is full of data nobody has touched in months. Lifecycle policies automatically move cold blobs to cheaper tiers. Here's how to deploy them with Terraform and stop paying premium rates for forgotten files. A company stores 10 TB of application logs, backups, and reports in Azure Blob Storage. All of it sits in the Hot tier at $0.018/GB. Only 20% gets accessed regularly. The other 80%? Paying premium prices for the privilege of being ignored. Monthly waste: $115. Annual waste: $1,382. And that's just one storage account. 🧊 Here's the Azure Blob Storage pricing reality: Storage per GB/month (LRS, East US): Hot tier: $0.018/GB Cool tier: $0.010/GB (44% cheaper) Cold tier: $0.0036/GB (80% cheaper) Archive tier: $0.002/GB (89% cheaper) The math for 10 TB with typical access patterns (20% active, 30% occasional, 50% rarely/never): All Hot: 10,240 GB x $0.018 = $184.32/month Optimized: Hot (2 TB): 2,048 GB x $0.018 = $36.86 Cool (3 TB): 3,072 GB x $0.010 = $30.72 Cold (3 TB): 3,0