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