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Ruben Pascual Blanco avatar image
Ruben Pascual Blanco asked

Azure functions storage costs are incredibly obscure, what am I paying for?

I switched from legacy Cloudscript to Azure Functions in order to be able to interact with Inventory v2.

The thing is that I spent years with legacy and everything was transparent and fine: I would pay only for excess function executions or excess time to execute functions.

now with Azure I had to create a storage account that is already showing some kind of "this will cost" stats started reaching their limit even 2 days after creating them, and it's only me logging in to the game.

What is LRS Write Operations? What is Protocol Operations? What is Read Operations? In which way do functions trigger those things? is it logging? is it calling Server API? is it about the info received from a client in a request? I have spent a whole week searching information about how to know what causes costs in Azure functions and I cannot find anything. This is too obscure, as I have absolutely no idea about what to configure, what to avoid, what to do in order to avoid extra costs, or even what these read, write or protocol operations are about. The worst is that most of the predicted cost (very small but still) is all from storage, not from the function itself.

WIth Legacy cloudscript there was not anything of this cryptic stuff, and I just had to care about optimizing for less execution time, and amount of executions, and that was it. I knew exactly how my function would influnece it's cost. Now with the whole storage stuff I don't even know what is contributing to costs.

CloudScript
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Simon Cui avatar image Simon Cui commented ·

Hi, you may refer to Azure Blob Storage pricing for Storage costs. Other related costs can also be found in *Here*.

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Ruben Pascual Blanco avatar image Ruben Pascual Blanco Simon Cui commented ·

Yes, I understand it, but I can't find any info about what causes the Write and Read operations that are listed as "costs" under the storage information.

I have a single function dealing with catalog and player inventories that is called a couple times over a login process or character customization, and just with me alone testing the game, im already nearly the free Write Operations limit.

Any insight of what API calls cause Write/Read operations? or is it certain logging configurations?

5468-image.png

These 3 are the ones that I can't find anything about. I also checked Functions metrics and theres no File System usage at all.

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Simon Cui avatar image Simon Cui Ruben Pascual Blanco commented ·

Yes, there are detailed description about which API calls caused operations in the first link that I mentioned above. For example, you can take a look at this screenshot from that webpage: 5469-readandwritefees.png

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Ruben Pascual Blanco avatar image Ruben Pascual Blanco Simon Cui commented ·

[duplicate comment, remove this]

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Simon Cui avatar image
Simon Cui answered

For clarification, our forum only focuses on the technical questions about PlayFab. If your question is only relevant to the billing of Azure Functions, please navigate to the guidance of Azure pricing -- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/contact-sales/.

If you have any other questions that relevant to Azure Web Service but unrelated to PlayFab, please contact the Azure support -- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/options/ for the professional supports.

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Ruben Pascual Blanco avatar image Ruben Pascual Blanco commented ·

As far as I have seen, Azure functions have extra transaction costs inherent to them regardless of playfab environment.

Can Inventory v2 be used with Legacy Cloudscript in order to avoid Azure Functions, which because of storage costs per transaction and operations, seems to be incredibly more expensive than Legacy Cloudscript?

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Simon Cui avatar image Simon Cui Ruben Pascual Blanco commented ·

Referring to this post: https://community.playfab.com/questions/65320/how-to-use-economy-v2-on-legacy-cloudscript.html, the CloudScript(Legacy) may not be able to use inventory v2 features.

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Steve Lobdell avatar image
Steve Lobdell answered

I couldn't explain it to you, but I've never tried to understand it. I've been calling Azure Functions several hundred times a day the past week doing development and my total cost currently is at $0.08 for the week.

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Ruben Pascual Blanco avatar image Ruben Pascual Blanco commented ·

This is what scares me. With cloudscript I never had any cost at all. With functions you have already cents of costs in one week just from 1 tester, and the cost don't even come from the functions themselves. I fear for what it would cost to maintain an actual playerbase using our game intensively.

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Lee Sang jun avatar image Lee Sang jun Ruben Pascual Blanco commented ·

I got support using admin department and azure backup plane for developer. This is because reading and writing operations of the storage are used as strings in the process of uploading visual code and studio work to virtual storage. After uploading once, there is no charge. I can't believe it

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