Optimize object storage costs automatically with smart tier—now generally available

Azure has announced the general availability of smart tier for Azure Blob Storage and Data Lake Storage. Smart tier is a fully managed, automated tiering feature that continuously evaluates object access patterns and moves data across hot, cool, and cold tiers without manual lifecycle rule management. Data inactive for 30 days moves to cool, and after another 60 days to cold; re-access immediately promotes it back to hot. Over 50% of smart-tier-managed capacity has already shifted to cooler tiers during preview. Setup requires only selecting smart tier as the default access tier on zonal-redundancy storage accounts. There are no tier transition, early deletion, or retrieval charges — only a monthly monitoring fee per managed object. Objects under 128 KiB are excluded from tiering. The feature is now available in nearly all zonal public cloud regions.