Item: Azure Cosmos DB
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Azure Cosmos DB is being used as part of our platform. It is being used to help the existing platform we have to scale with the amount of data that we are storing. The data stored in SQL servers did not scale for us. Reports and graphs generated from the data were slow. Azure Cosmos DB improved performance.

Pros and Cons

Global key distribution
Elasticity in scale

ANSI SQL support
Pure ACIDity support

Return on Investment

Learning curve is pretty high
Another "language" to learn

Alternatives Considered

Redis, MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase, CouchDB, Aerospike Database and Google Cloud Spanner

Azure Cosmos DB has the benefit of having multi-master key tenancy compared to Redis and Mongo. Reads are just as fast, if not faster than Mongo. However, the distribution of writes (i.e. ACID transactions) isn't as high as Google Cloud Spanner or CouchDB. Azure Cosmos DB writes slower than Cassandra, but with Cosmos, we do not have to worry about replication or tools like Zookeeper to handle it. Azure Cosmos DB has it built-in.

Other Software Used

Google Cloud Spanner, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Redis, Cassandra, Aerospike Database, Couchbase

Likelihood to Recommend

If issues are occurring with Mongo DB, then using Azure Cosmos DB could be better in certain instances. However, I would not replace it completely over Cassandra or Redis. Through size in k-v distribution could become an issue, especially with Redis. Azure Cosmos DB could help in that apsect.

Likelihood to Renew

5

The total cost of ownership is much higher than anticipated. The documentation for their API calls is still not complete. TCO did go up as a result as well. Having users learning another JQL-like language also added more complexity to it. Support of ANSI-SQL would be ideal. But the cost of managing it is much less compared to Redis, Mongo, or Cassandra.

Azure Cosmos DB Review

Overall Satisfaction with Azure Cosmos DB