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Azure Cosmos DB; A Global Database Service for Any Scale

by Spanish Point - Aug 29, 2019
Azure Cosmos DB; A Global Database Service for Any Scale

What is Azure Cosmos DB?

Azure Cosmos DB is Microsoft’s globally distributed, multi model database service. Cosmos DB enables you to elastically and independently scale storage worldwide, get single-digit millisecond read and write latencies at the 99th percentile, 99.999% high availability and five well-defined consistency choices.

Modern applications are required to be highly responsive and always online. To achieve low latency and high availability. These applications need to be deployed in data centres that are close to their users. In addition, applications need to respond in real time to changes which can be large scale and at peak hours while simultaneously making large volumes of data available to users in milliseconds.

The storage is elastically and independently scaled across any number of Azure regions worldwide or using your favourite API including SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Tables or Gremlin. The service provides comprehensive service level agreements (SLA) for throughput, latency, availability and consistency guarantees, something no other database offers.


Key Benefits of Cosmos DB

Turnkey Global Distribution
Cosmos DB allows you to build highly responsive and highly available applications on a global scale. The service transparently replicates your data wherever your users are and allows you to add or remove Azure regions so users can interact with a replica of the data that is closest to them.

Single-digit millisecond latency
Using Cosmos DM, you can build highly responsive, planet scale applications. Based on a novel multi-master replication protocol in addition to a latch-free and write optimised database engine, Cosmos DB guarantees less than 10-ms latencies for both reads and writes at the 99th percentile, globally.

Elastic and Unlimited Scalability
You can elastically scale up from hundreds to millions of requests/sec with a single APP call and pay only for the throughput (and storage) you need. Designed with horizontal partitioning and multi-master replication, the unprecedented elastic scalability for your writes and reads helps manage unexpected spikes in workloads without over-provision for the peak.

Multi-model with wire protocol-compatible API endpoints
By default, a core API like SQL can be used for querying your cosmos database. However, Cosmos DB offers a range of APIs to work with your data stored in your cosmos database. APIs implemented by Cosmos DB also implements;

  • Cassandra
  • MongoDB
  • Gremlin
  • Azure Table Storage

Supporting the wire protocols of commonly used NoSQL APIs, CosmosDB allows you to easily migrate to CosmosDB, keep your applications portable, get fully managed cloud service with industry leading, financially backed SLAs for the common NoSQL APIs and elastically scale the provisioned throughput and storage for databases.


Any web, mobile, gaming, and IoT application that needs to handle massive amounts of data, reads, and writes at a global scale with near-real response times for a variety of data will benefit from Cosmos DB’s guaranteed high availability, high throughput, low latency, and tunable consistency. 

To learn more about CosmosDB, join our Azure Data Analytics & Machine Learning Bootcamp and Training!