Azure Blob Storage · Rate Limits

Microsoft Azure Blob Storage Rate Limits

Azure Storage publishes scalability targets per storage account and per blob. Limits are not plan-tier scoped; they are account-type scoped (standard general-purpose v2, premium block blob). When targets are exceeded, the service returns 503 (Server Busy) or 500 (Operation Timeout). Higher targets are available by support request.

Microsoft Azure Blob Storage Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for Azure Blob Storage on the APIs.io network, conforming to the API Commons Rate Limits specification.

It captures 6 rate-limit definitions, measuring bandwidth and requests_per_second.

The profile also includes 4 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for serverBusy and operationTimeout.

Tagged areas include Rate Limiting, Storage, and Microsoft Azure.

6 Limits
Rate LimitingStorageMicrosoft Azure

Limits

Standard storage account ingress (US/EU) account
bandwidth · second
60 Gbps
Standard storage account egress (US/EU) account
bandwidth · second
120 Gbps
Standard storage account max request rate account
requests_per_second · second
20000
Default scalability target across all blob/queue/table/file operations.
Single blob max throughput blob
requests_per_second · second
500
A single blob is targeted at ~500 requests/sec regardless of tier.
Premium block blob ingress account
bandwidth
see Azure docs (premium block blob)
Premium block blob egress account
bandwidth
see Azure docs (premium block blob)

Policies

Backoff on 503/500
When Azure Storage returns 503 (Server Busy) or 500 (Operation Timeout), back off exponentially with jitter and retry.
Partition by blob name
Distribute high-rate writes across partitions by varying the blob-name prefix to avoid single-partition hot-spotting (~500 RPS per blob/partition).
Increase via support
Workloads requiring hundreds of thousands of RPS or petabytes can request higher account targets via Azure support.
Use multiple accounts
Shard workloads across multiple storage accounts when account-level limits become the bottleneck.

Sources