– If you don't need the hierarchical namespace whatsoever (for non-analytical use cases), this could mean a separate storage account. The storage cost is the same but transaction costs are higher when the HNS is enabled (discussed in item #8 of this post).
Click through for more details, including several more tips about Azure Storage Accounts, Azure Blob Storage Containers, and the Azure Storage Blobs themselves.
One of the best things about Azure, and the cloud in general, is we can automate most anything, and we are going to look at how to automate Azure VM Storage. This allows us to come up with some outside-of-the-box solutions. I had a customer with a road block that we were able to work around by automating some things with their Azure Virtual Machines.
Their challenge was that they wanted to move their test and development environments to Azure, but the storage cost was prohibitive. They needed premium storage to mimic their production environment, but it was not financially viable for test and development so they were going to keep it all on premises. During our conversations I learned that they only test between 8am and 5pm, Monday through Friday. My suggestion was that we put their databases on cheaper storage during off times and only premium when they are actively using it.
This doesn't look like a one-hour task but if you're in need of some cost savings on storage in non-production environments, check out Ryan's scripts.