Azure Blob vs. Dataverse for Images in 100,000s

[MadMuck]

Hi all,

I am not a data nor a licensing expert, and I'd love some more educated opinions about the best storage solution for my situation.

My company has a citizen developer using Azure Blob to store a large number of images, but my team wants to know if it makes more sense (logistically/monetarily) to migrate the user's project into Dataverse.  In terms of current state, the user wasn't sure how to extract an exact size and number, but one set of nine containers (not all are used) shows a total of 24.76GiB, and a separate container houses an estimate of about 200,000 images of 25-65KiB each.  Images are uploaded daily, but they are infrequently accessed (the access tier is "Cool (Inferred)").  I believe this data has been gathered over the course of 3-ish years.  In Dataverse, we have a 1.47TB maximum for file storage of which we've only used 0.08TB.

From what I've uncovered so far, it seems like it won't make a huge difference where the files are stored until potentially years down the road, but that's just from a bit of math and intuition as this is really not my realm of knowledge.  Is that a correct assumption?  Is there a technical or monetary advantage to moving to Dataverse (beyond the initial effort to migrate the data in the first place), or is Azure Blob already the best place to be storing such a large number of files?

[ChrisPiasecki · Accepted solution]

Hi @MadMuck,

I would say it depends. You probably don't want a single app eating up all of your file storage capacity. Azure Blob Storage is going to be more economic from a cost perspective. 

But it depends on what the requirements are. Do you need the images to be readily accessible alongside your Dataverse record whereever it's being used? The advantage of storing it in Dataverse is convenience as you can easily upload/download an image in a model driven app form without any effort, and there are actions in Power Automate to work with them too. The other aspect too is being able to leverage the role based security model in Dataverse as the image is part of the record. With Blob Storage you won't be able to get this granular without building some custom security model which would be effort intensive. If you require a really long retention period for images, I would favor Blob Storage for cost reasons. 

Hope this helps. 

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