What is Azure Cosmos DB?

1. Introduction 

Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft's globally distributed, multi-model database service. The beauty of Cosmos DB has enabled us to elastically and independently scale to store data in Azure regions worldwide. Azure Cosmos DB stores data in JSON format meaning we can have a schema-free architecture for data storage. This allows us to store the data in multiple models as per our need, examples – key-value, graph, documents, etc. Normally, Azure Cosmos DB is used when Any web, mobile, gaming, and IoT application that needs to handle massive amounts of data, reads and writes.

2. Tangible benefits 

• Highly availability / Always ON - Microsoft claims Cosmos DB provides 99.999% high availability. Azure Cosmos DB replicates your data across all the Azure regions associated with the Cosmos account. It consists of multiple layers of redundancy for your data.
• Faster response, Low latency – Since Cosmos DB data is replicated and stored the nearest data center.
• Elastic scalability - Cosmos DB offers unique elastic scalability for your writes and reads, all around the globe. Data of Cosmos DB is horizontally partitioned to scale up the individual container in a database which results in increasing the performance and scalability of the application. The items inside the container are divided into distinct subsets called logical partitions having their own partition key. Each partition across all the regions is replicated.
• Globally distributed operational analytics – By using spark technique in Azure Cosmos can be used for batch and stream processing, and as a serving layer for low latency access.
• Play with Cosmos DB using NoSQL APIs – Cosmos DB offers a choice of APIs to work with your data. We can use SQL Core API. Cosmos DB also implements APIs for Cassandra, MongoDB, Gremlin and Azure Table Storage.

3. SLA 

The service offers comprehensive 99.99% SLAs which covers the guarantees for throughput, consistency, availability, and latency for the Cosmos DB Database Accounts scoped to a single Azure region. Read more

4. Azure Cosmos DB free?

Azure Cosmos DB is not free. However, developers can try Azure Cosmos DB for free to evaluate the Azure Cosmos DB. Azure Cosmos DB bills for provisioned throughput and consumed storage by the hour. Read more

5. FAQ

Please find the FAQ here.

6. Try Azure Cosmos DB from here.