Introduction to Azure Cosmos DB

Cosmos Database(DB) is a highly scalable, NoSQL database service, offered by Microsoft’s Azure. Cosmos DB enables you to elastically and independently scale throughput and storage across any number of Azure regions worldwide.

Azure Cosmos DB supports four API models i.e. SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Tables, or Gremlin, as well as Key-Value pairs and Documents.

Key benefits of Azure Cosmos DB

1. Build globally distributed apps easily

Using Azure Cosmos DB, we can add or remove any of the Azure regions to our Cosmos account at any time, with a click of a button. It will seamlessly replicate your data wherever your users are.

2. Highly Scalable

Azure Cosmos DB has the power to handle the increased load by adding additional servers to the cluster. You can elastically scale up from 1000s to 100s of variant requests/sec around the globe, with a single API call.

3. Build highly responsive apps

Using Cosmos DB, you can build highly responsive applications. It’s a multi-master replication protocol and a latch-free and write-optimized database engine. This capability enables sustained ingestion of data and blazing-fast queries for highly responsive apps.

4. Multi-model with native NoSQL API support

Cosmos DB is a multi-model database. So, it can be used for storing data in Key-value Pair, Document-based, Germlin, and Column Family-based databases.

5. Enterprise-grade security

Cosmos DB is certified for a wide array of compliance standards. Additionally, all data in Cosmos DB is encrypted at rest and in motion. Cosmos DB provides row-level authorization and adheres to strict security standards.

6. No schema or index management

For a globally distributed app, Keeping database schema and indexes in-sync with an application’s schema is always painful. But here, the Cosmos DB engine is fully schema-agnostic. While migrating schemas, Cosmos DB automatically indexes all data and serves queries fast.

Azure Cosmos DB for IoT

Here are the 2 main reasons why Azure Cosmos DB is great for in IoT applications:

Cosmos DB can ingest semi-structured data at extremely high rates.
Cosmos DB can serve indexed queries back out with extremely low latency and high availability.

Cosmos DB is a multi-model database with wire protocol–compatible API endpoints for Cassandra, MongoDB, SQL, Gremlin, Etcd, and Table along with built-in support for Jupyter notebooks.

In short, after successfully implementing the Azure Cosmos DB, many enterprise organizations from different industries have an effective turnaround. This can be a good choice for highly data-intensive systems like IoT, online gaming applications, and more.

Curious about how Azure Cosmos DB can impact your business? Get in touch with us today.