Story in a nutshell: I wanted to copy a huge Azure blob from one place to another. Since there are no convenient Azure management tools from Microsoft*, I used command line AzCopy utility. A minute or two into the process, I realized that

a) The speed ain’t that great and the copy will take several hours.

b) The source and the destination are in different data centers, so I will be charged something around $20 for the transfer.

So, I went ahead and stopped the copy by pressing Ctrl+C. To my great surprise, I was not able to delete the destination blob: the error came “Copy operation in progress”. Despite me cancelling the copy on my side, internally Azure kept churning bytes and happily charging me money in the process. It took me around 2 minutes to find Stop-AzureStorageBlobCopy command, and around 10 minutes to figure out how the heck I pass my account info to it. Meanwhile, the money register kept ticking… Also, I was copying from other person’s account, so it was not even my money I was spending. Very bad feeling.

* – I think Microsoft is waiting for a good toolset to emerge, and then they will buy the company that made it. We’ve seen it before. Meanwhile, we are stuck with assorted set of semi-working utilities.