For Premium SSD and Standard SSD disks 513 GiB or larger, Azure now offers the option to enable Performance Plus — unlocking higher IOPS and MBps at no extra cost. Many environments that previously required custom performance settings continue to pay for additional throughput unnecessarily. By not enabling Performance Plus on eligible disks, organizations miss a straightforward opportunity to reduce disk spend while maintaining or improving performance. The feature is opt-in and must be explicitly enabled on each qualifying disk.
Each Azure VM size has a defined limit for total disk IOPS and throughput. When high-performance disks (e.g., Premium SSDs with high IOPS capacity) are attached to low-tier VMs, the disk’s performance capabilities may exceed what the VM can consume. This results in paying for performance that the VM cannot access. For example, attaching a large Premium SSD to a B-series VM will not provide the expected performance because the VM cannot deliver that level of throughput. Without aligning disk selection with VM limits, organizations incur unnecessary storage costs with no corresponding performance benefit.
Workloads using legacy Premium SSD managed disks may be eligible for migration to Premium SSD v2, which delivers equivalent or improved performance characteristics at a lower cost. Premium SSD v2 decouples disk size from performance metrics like IOPS and throughput, enabling more granular cost optimization. Additionally, Premium SSD disks are often overprovisioned in size—for example, a P40 disk with more IOPS and capacity than the workload requires—resulting in inflated storage costs. Rightsizing includes both transitioning to v2 and resizing to smaller SKUs (e.g., P40 → P20) based on observed utilization. Failure to address either form of overprovisioning leads to persistent waste.
Standard SSD disks can often be replaced with Premium SSD v2 disks, offering enhanced IOPS, throughput, and durability at competitive or lower pricing. For workloads that require moderate to high performance but are currently constrained by Standard SSD capabilities, migrating to Premium SSD v2 improves both performance and cost efficiency without significant operational overhead.
Disks attached to VMs that have been stopped for an extended period, particularly when showing no read or write activity, may indicate abandoned infrastructure or obsolete resources. Retaining these disks without validation leads to unnecessary monthly storage costs. Reviewing and cleaning up inactive disks helps optimize spend and maintain storage hygiene.
Tables with no read or write activity often represent deprecated applications, obsolete telemetry, or abandoned development artifacts. Retaining inactive tables increases storage costs and operational complexity. Regularly auditing and cleaning up unused tables helps maintain a streamlined, cost-effective storage environment.
Files that show no read or write activity over an extended period often indicate redundant or abandoned data. Keeping inactive files in higher-cost storage classes unnecessarily increases monthly spend. Implementing proactive archiving, deletion workflows, and safety features like Blob Soft Delete or Versioning improves cost efficiency while protecting against accidental data loss.
Buckets without Autoclass enabled can accumulate infrequently accessed data in more expensive storage classes, inflating monthly costs. Enabling Autoclass allows GCS to automatically move objects to lower-cost tiers based on observed access behavior, optimizing storage costs without manual lifecycle policy management. Activating Autoclass reduces operational overhead while maintaining seamless access to objects across storage classes.
This inefficiency arises when snapshots are retained long after they’ve served their purpose. Snapshots may have been created for backups, migrations, or disaster recovery plans but were never deleted—even after the related workload or volume was decommissioned. Over time, these unused snapshots accumulate, continuing to incur storage costs without providing operational value.
This inefficiency occurs when small files are stored in S3 storage classes that impose a minimum object size charge, resulting in unnecessary costs. Small files under 128 KB stored in Glacier Instant Retrieval, Standard-IA, or One Zone-IA are billed as if they were 128 KB. If these small files are accessed frequently, S3 Standard may be a better fit. For infrequently accessed small files, transitioning them to archival storage classes like Glacier Flexible Retrieval or Deep Archive can optimize storage spend. Poorly tuned lifecycle policies often allow small files to remain in suboptimal storage classes indefinitely.
